Louise Gaffney Flannigan, born in 1867 and died in 1949, lived her whole life in New Haven, Connecticut.  As the sister and wife of men who worked for the New Haven Railroad, she wrote flowery poems as odes to the courage and fortitude of railroad trainmen, and for good reason.  Working for the railroad in the late 1800s was dangerous — this mode of transportation was still very new and laws regulating the railroads to ensure the safety of the workers were few.  Many of the poems Louise wrote were memorials to the men who died on the job.  Sadly, even her husband, Frank Flannigan, died in 1915 when he was hit by a train.

The Louise Gaffney Flannigan Papers, part of the Railroad History Archive here at the Dodd Research Center, is a very unique collection, quite unlike the typical railroad collection of timetables, track maps and photographs of locomotives and stations.  Louise’s papers consist of her poems and writings, almost all about her admiration of her beloved trainmen and her despair when one falls while on duty.  The poems tell us a lot about Louise herself, about her resilience and her humor.  Despite her constant fear that another man will die while working for the railroad, she had a real respect for the trains, their power and their beauty. 

Shown here is the first stanza of “A Brakeman’s Death,” undated but it must have been written before 1889.  Louise  writes “Whenever I pass near the railroad track, and see the trains pass by so fast, I love to wave to the jolly brakeman, seated on the cartops, as one by one they pass, Their eyes are ever on the alert, To see each bridge and dodge down low, They run quickly also to their brakes, Over cars covered with ice and snow.”

Hard work, indeed.

For more information about the Louise Gaffney Flannigan Papers, see the finding at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/flannigan/MSS20070066.html

The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company Records is not a new collection — we’ve had it in the archive since 1984 — but it is a solid collection of extraordinary historical materials that draws a steady line of researchers from genealogists and textile historians to UConn’s undergraduate and graduate students and secondary school students.  The collections provides strong materials documenting this Manchester, Connecticut, company’s rise, in 1838 as the Mount Nebo Silk Company founded by six Cheney brothers, to its status as a leading producer of silk in the 1880s, to its peak in the 1920s when it produced silk for fashionable French garments, and then follows its decline after World War II (when it produced parachute material for the war effort) to its sale in the 1950s to J.P. Stevens & Company.  The Cheney family was renowned for their paternalistic attitude to their workers and for providing housing, schools, and recreation facilities for its workers.  An extraordinary component in the collection is a large set of employee cards from 1900 to 1940 where details of each worker — his or her country of origin, languages spoken and read, levels of education — are available, making that an amazing resource for ethnic history research.

This image from a 1929 brochure shows how the company marketed its fashionable fabrics.  Tres chic!

A New Haven Railroad dining car employee serves Thanksgiving dinner to a passenger.

A SNET employee is served Thanksgiving dinner at the New London office cafeteria.

Tucked inside is Grace Murray’s famous dressing.  See recipe on Page 27.”

Of course we wouldn’t leave you hanging and not give you the recipe.  All of us at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center wish you and your loved ones a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Patrick B. McGinnis in the cab of a New Haven Railroad locomotive, 1954

August 14, 2009, is the 46th anniversary of the indictment by a Federal grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts, of former New Haven Railroad president Patrick B. McGinnis on a charge of obtaining personal profit from a deal involving the sale of railroad cars while he was president of the Boston & Maine Railroad.  McGinnis was president of the New Haven Railroad from April 1, 1954, to January 18, 1956, and was controversial from the outset.  He won the presidency through a proxy fight, ousting President Frederick “Buck” Dumaine, Jr., and during his tenure he was regarded as controversial for deferring maintenance and buying expensive new motive power at a time when the New Haven Railroad was experiencing diminishing ridership and the effects of extensive floods in August 1955, in which hundreds of miles of track were damaged.  Immediately upon being ousted as President of the NHRR McGinnis became President of the Boston & Maine Railroad, but was indicted a few years later for graft and served time in a federal prison.  Those who worked for the railroad or have studied the history of the New Haven Railroad still today debate the dastardly deeds of this flamboyant railroad president.

This photograph shows Patrick McGinnis in 1954 in the cab of a New Haven Railroad locomotive, and is from the Charles Gunn Papers in Archives & Special Collections.  You can find out more about the Railroad History Archive at http://railroads.uconn.edu/