Water Rails & Oil - Historic Mid & South Jefferson County

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Left: Arthur Stilwell, financier and
philanthropist, founded Port Arthur
as the ocean terminus of his new
Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf
Railroad, which later became the
Kansas City Southern Railroad.
Stilwell designed the railroad,
financed it, and served as its
president. He also wrote and
published books, plays, and a hymn.
When Stilwell died, one newspaper
stated ‘that he was the last of the
great empire builders.’
COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST,
PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS.
Right: Jennie A. Wood, wife of
Arthur Stilwell.
COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF THE GULF COAST,
PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS.
inspiration came from a Brownie, or just good
observation, but Stilwell noticed that advertisements
for local businesses appeared on all
schedules for New York Central trains, but that
most railroads in the South did not carry them.
He convinced several railroads in Virginia to
allow him to print their schedules without cost
to the railroads in return for his selling and
keeping the revenue for advertisements, plus a
pass on the trains to make his sales rounds.
Printing schedules taught Stilwell, who had a
quick mind despite its lack of formal education, a
great deal about the operation of railroads. “On a
hunch,” Stilwell wrote in an autobiography, he
decided to move to Kansas City and build a rail
connection to the Gulf of Mexico to give
midwestern farmers access to the international
market for shipping their abundant crops of grain.
Stilwell arrived in Kansas City with $25,000,
an inadequate sum to finance his scheme to
reach the sea, so he engaged in several other
enterprises to accumulate necessary capital. He
founded the Kansas City Suburban Belt Line
and Grand Central Railway Station, offering
public transit to the city’s growing population.
Next came coal mines located near Hume,
Missouri, both for the product and the business
of hauling the fuel most in demand in the last
quarter of the nineteenth-century.
With sufficient capital to begin his dream, in
1895 Stilwell and his investors considered
building their railroad, the Kansas City,
Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad (the “PEEGEE” in
railroadese), south to Shreveport, then
purchasing Paul Bremond’s Houston, East &
West Texas Railroad, completed from Houston
to Shreveport in 1883. The HE&WT (“Hell
Either Way Taken”) also had a direct connection
to the Gulf waters at the Port of Galveston.
Stilwell rode the HE&WT to investigate the line
and port facilities, and at first found everything
satisfactory; he made an arrangement with the
Galveston Terminal Company for shipping and
took an option on the rail line. Before he
presented the business plan to his board of
directors in Kansas City, however, Stilwell’s
Brownies intervened.
Stilwell claimed to have experienced a dream
in which he received a message to abandon the
proposed arrangement with the HE&WT because
Galveston would soon be destroyed by a storm.
Instead, Stilwell sensed, he should build his own
rail line more directly south from the
southwestern route of the existing line, locate his
terminal inland on the north shore of Lake Sabine,
and dig a canal connecting its port facilities with
Sabine Pass, which was located much nearer open
water and more vulnerable to tropical storms and
hurricanes. The canal should be located on the
western shore, said the Brownie, and its excavated
earth pushed to the west to help protect shipping
from storms on the lake.
14 ✦ WATER, RAILS & OIL