CHAPTER 5Pioneer and Pullman Mythmaking

At the height of the Civil War, the Pullman Company unveiled Car A, later named Pioneer. Its immense cost—enough, contemporaries noted, to build a house—would have been sufficient to gain attention. Constructed in a workshop near present-day Chicago Union Station, it set a new standard for railroad passenger vehicle design. Paying close attention to detail, Albert created an unusually complex look by combining different woods in an inlay scheme reminiscent of stately home interiors. The car had a complicated ventilation system to keep soot, dust, and other particles out, sixteen sash windows to open for fresh air, framed mirrors hanging between each one, and an unusual combination of two eight-wheel bogies designed to help smooth the ride over rough tracks. Each system represented the latest technology. No photographs of the car's inside exist, but when complete, it represented a giant step forward in the provision of comfortable surroundings for railroad travel. In this case, the pinnacle of their work almost proved their undoing: they were trying to sell luxury at a time of immense national suffering.

The conflict between North and South proved lasting and deadly. Over the course of five years of civil war, as many as 750,000 soldiers died, along with an unknown number of civilians. Southern cities were razed, the economies of both sides transformed, and the federal government gained unprecedented power. The national banking system, the rapid growth of industries, and the creation of a transcontinental transportation system slowly diluted local political authority and economic autonomy. Americans on both sides sacrificed for the war effort, and the production of luxury railroad cars seemed obscene to many.

Despite the optics, the Civil War era was a period of steady growth for Pullman & Field. Railroads gave the North a strategic advantage by carrying soldiers and weaponry plus supplies and food quickly throughout the section. Railroad expansion slowed but did not stop, and indeed the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy bridged the Mississippi River during the war, the second railroad to do so. Pullman survived with George engaged in raising capital and Albert supervising affairs in Chicago and Springfield. When the conflict began, three of the partnership's cars ran on the Alton railroad. Four years into the struggle, twelve Pullman & Field sleeping cars operated out of Chicago.

While undeniably luxurious compared with contemporary sleeping cars, Pullmans offered few technological innovations. They were certainly no more innovative because the Pullman brothers copied or modified many of the improvements their competitors made. The first sleeping-car patent had been awarded in 1854 to Henry Myer, who devised a way to convert seats into bunkbeds, a concept Pullman cars duplicated. Edward C. Knight invented mechanisms for lowering beds from the ceiling of a car, an idea several railroads adopted during the Civil War. Another tinkerer, Eli Wheeler, created seat backs that could pivot and convert quickly into a sleeping berth. The idea of dividing sleeping cars into separate sections came from Theodore Woodruff and became one of Pullman's enduring features. A section was simply a pair of facing seats converted into a lower bunk and an upper bunk dropped from the ceiling. A heavy curtain provided privacy, although it did little to muffle a neighbor's snoring and could contribute to a sense of closeness some riders found claustrophobic.¹

Like their competitors, the Pullmans found a way to create and meet the demand for comfortable overnight travel. Their first vehicles were little more than converted day coaches, which limited the scope for innovation. Constrained by the interior dimensions and the need to respect existing weight and size restrictions, the Pullman vision could not be fully realized. Those early cars did prove successful, and their profitability on the Alton Road convinced the new president of that company, Timothy Blackstone, to help the brothers. When George conceived of building the most luxurious and expensive car yet to run on American railroads, Blackstone agreed to supply land for a new workshop in Chicago.

Road testing of Car A began on January 24, 1865. An early report called it “more like a drawing room in a gentleman's mansion than an ordinary sleeping car,” a source of optimism for the brothers. This story drew attention to the richness of the couches, the depth of the carpets, the cost of the mirrors, and the cleanliness of the car. The seats converted relatively quickly and easily into bunks while drapes pulled across each berth offered rudimentary privacy. For passengers alighting in Chicago, the Alton Railroad reserved a block of rooms in the Tremont House.² But the car remained unused despite the Pullmans’ high hopes for it.

In April 1865, the Civil War claimed its most famous victim when, to the shock of the nation, President Abraham Lincoln died by an assassin's bullet. This lamentable occasion gave the Pullmans an opportunity to bring Pioneer (known as Car A at the time) to the public's notice. Lincoln's corpse lay in state in Washington, DC, for a week before traveling by train for thirteen days from the nation's capital to Springfield, Illinois, stopping at major cities on the way for public viewings. After being put on display in Chicago, where visitors complained about the visible decomposition of Lincoln's face, the coffin was placed in the president's car at the Alton Road depot and taken on the final leg of its journey to the Illinois state capital. Three separate trains made up the melancholy retinue, and Pioneer was attached to one of them taking dignitaries from Chicago to Springfield.³

The minor part Pioneer played in the Lincoln funeral procession proved incompatible with the image and expectations the Pullman brothers had of the new vehicle. To heighten its importance, George invented three myths: first, that Lincoln's body traveled in it; second, that Mary Lincoln returned to Springfield in Pioneer; and third—and most implausibly—that the Alton Road voluntarily narrowed its platforms and widened its bridges and tunnels to accommodate the unusually large car. George told this story up to end of his life, ungracefully calling Lincoln's death “good luck” for the future of the Pullman Company as the railroad “worked day and night, pulling up platforms and widening bridges and cuts” for Pioneer, which operated as “the funeral car.”⁴

These Pullman fabrications are easily refuted. The president's car, built at government shops in Alexandria, Virginia, and owned by the federal government, carried his casket for the entire trip.⁵ The First Lady remained for more than a month in the White House after the assassination so she could not have accompanied her husband's body to Springfield. Contemporary press reports testify that Pioneer was merely one among many cars used for the three trains covering the final leg of the journey. And as for the idea that the Alton shaved stations and rebuilt structures for the luxury conveyance, that was simply ridiculous: such a costly undertaking could not have occurred in the time frame required for the journey, there is literally no documentary evidence to support this story, and the cash-strapped railroad could not afford to do so.⁶

Such mythologizing played an important role in what can be labeled the Pullman branding process. Astute manipulator of public opinion, the Pullman Company amassed a store of tales glorifying this early period. Pioneer's role in Lincoln's funeral train, suitably embellished, provided rich material for corporate fictions. Company releases regularly repeated the idea that Pioneer ferried the slain president's corpse from Chicago to its resting place in Springfield, supposedly inspiring widespread admiration of the car and a constant stream of business. Horace Porter, as vice president of the company, helped perpetuate the full range of Pullman myths by contributing a chapter on the topic of passenger travel to an 1889 book, The American Railway. Porter's essay focuses almost exclusively and unsurprisingly on Pullman cars and retells all the by-then-standard myths. He even added a new one, inventing a conversation between George Pullman and Abraham Lincoln on the topic of sleeping berths.⁷ Porter and others claimed George deliberately made the vehicle too big, confident railroads would want it so badly they would eagerly alter their rights of way.⁸ That the story should be taken as gospel for a century highlights the power of Pullman mythmaking.⁹ Pioneer did enter regular service on the Alton, setting a new level of Pullman luxury but requiring no renovation of platforms or bridges.

Following Lincoln's funeral, the car made its inaugural run on May 26, 1865.¹⁰ The Pioneer earned glowing reviews in the Bloomington, Illinois, press. With the catered dinner consumed and the wine flowing, Albert and George regaled invited passengers with the story of the sleeping car's origins in George's overnight experience in upstate New York.¹¹ Pioneer's rich appointments, from chandeliers and thick moquette carpeting to mirrored walls separating compartments and carefully painted inlaid wooden paneling, marked it as worthy of notice. Linen was changed daily from a central closet, a departure from the standard practice of reusing bedclothing and towels until a journey concluded. They had simplified the mechanism to convert seat to sleeping berth, with a series of counterweights facilitating a smooth and rapid transition from ceiling to bed.¹²

Despite positive reviews, Pioneer was not an immediate success. Slightly larger than its companion Pullman cars, it earned plaudits but not income. George hoped to build another car to its specifications but could not afford to do so. Its use on the Lincoln funeral services did not lead to a demand for it, and the Pullmans stored Pioneer in Chicago, where the most expensive car in their fleet sat unemployed. The historical record is incomplete, but it seems stories about its excessive height and width, which may only have been cover for its early disappointment, filtered into the contemporary press as allusions rather than measurements. It is difficult to gauge the truth about why Pioneer failed to create the splash George hoped it would, but it may simply have been lack of demand. Postwar economic recovery prioritized basic commodities, a category into which Pioneer did not fit. The company's financial future appeared perilous, and George worried that the firm would dissolve. His response was to renew the excursion campaign Albert managed.¹³

As the post-war economy recovered, demand for recreational travel strengthened. By the end of 1866, forty-eight Pullman cars ran on five different railroads, four operating out of Chicago plus the Great Western of Canada. Pioneer found a home on the Michigan Central, and travelers took notice. To benefit from economies of scale, the company built its vehicles in matching pairs and introduced them together. When, in 1867, the twin “hotel cars” (in which passengers were served food at their seats) Plymouth Rock and the much-lauded Western World (“the best equipped sleeping car yet built”) rolled out of the Aurora shops, they cost exactly the same, $29,644.66. The itemized accounts went into granular detail, down to forty-two cents each for a broom and two feather dusters at four dollars.¹⁴ Railroad operations were slowly making feasible the type of direct long-distance travel that Pullman foresaw, and paired cars allowed the company to meet the growing demand for its operations.¹⁵

The Pullman reputation enhanced that of the railroads over which its cars ran. As early as May 1866, a passenger wrote about journeying from Detroit to Chicago on the Michigan Central “in the most beautiful sleeping car, Pullman's Atlantic.”¹⁶ New additions included a small kitchen to selected cars, hence the name hotel cars because passengers could remain onboard during meal stops to avoid the poorly cooked and rapidly consumed food found at depots. The first hotel car operated on the Great Western of Canada, meeting a demand few knew existed. The ability to imagine what passengers might desire on their journeys—which would include barbers, secretaries, cocktails, meals, and a host of other amenities—separated Pullman from other sleeping-car companies. In 1868, the Chicago & North Western Railroad signed a fifteen-year contract, attracted in part by the continued pace of Pullman innovation.

As the fleet of sleeping cars grew, George sought to maintain family unity, returning with a vengeance to his role as patriarch. As his own mansion was being built on Prairie Avenue, he rented a house in Chicago and moved his mother, brother Frank, and sisters Emma and Helen there from New York. They lived together for the next three years. In June 1867, the household expanded by one when thirty-six year old George married twenty-five year old Harriett Amelia Sanger. Known by all as Hattie, she was the daughter of James Y. Sanger, a building contractor, and Mary Catherine McKibben Sanger, both of whom would enter Albert's business orbit. Educated in a San Francisco convent, Hattie was an introverted hypochondriac who spent much of her life hiding from the limelight and seeking cures for undiagnosed illnesses. She and George had four children between 1868 and 1875, two girls (Florence and Harriett) and two boys (George Jr. and Walter Sanger). The rest of the family eventually returned to New York, but visits to Chicago and to Harvard, Illinois, to see Aunt Hannah Maria DaLee, sister of the Pullman matriarch and beloved aunt of Albert and George's children, continued to be a feature of Pullman family life. The family benefitted materially and reputationally from the success of the sleeping cars.

To create demand, Pullman operated excursions. Taking influential people on complimentary journeys to demonstrate the luxurious settings and smooth rides of Pullman cars became a standard form of advertising the new vehicles. These proved a powerful means of gaining free publicity, and no one did it better than the Pullman brothers. George and Albert hit on the winning formula for gaining attention in the competitive transportation marketplace. They devised the Pullman brand by firmly marking the name as synonymous with luxury and creating a public clamor for their cars. Managing this process was one man: Albert Benton Pullman.