Back in 1900, a young William Oliver Hoskins left McMinn County and lit out for Texas. Exactly to where and how he did this, I don’t know, but at the age of 14, Bill, as he was known, never saw his home state again. Whether he left on foot, by horse or mule or hopping a succession of trains, off he went. Life eventually led him to Yuba City, California, long after the California gold rush had faded into history. He died there in 1949, having never married.
I know little else about him except for a story my father told me. Bill was the younger brother of my dad’s grandmother, Nettie Cate Hoskins Johnston (see story here). He remembers riding with his mother to take Granny, along with her sister Tennie, to the train station in 1949 as the sisters embarked on their journey to California to bury their little brother.
Nettie Cate Hoskins and her husband, Sherwood Johnston
The three Hoskins siblings were all born near Heiskell Station, the children of Dr. Pleasant Moore (or Milton) Hoskins and Tennie Laurie Russell. Their mother died just a few weeks after giving birth to Bill, and their father remarried within a year. But after he died in 1892, the three of them (all under the age of 10) were divided up and passed around amongst various members of their mother’s family for the next eight years, their stepmother having two young children of her own to tend to. It was an ungrounded way to grow up.
Daddy said that Granny and his great aunt Tennie were gone for weeks tending to Bill’s funeral. He said they took the northern route going out (heading north to Chicago first) but returned to Knoxville on a more southerly route. All of this travel was no doubt aided by Granny’s husband, my great grandfather, Sherwood Johnston. Shub, as he as was called, spent his life as a Southern Railway engineer. He came by it honestly, as his father, James Grant Johnston, was a superintendent of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad.
I have a lot of railroad people in my family tree, but some news this week made me particularly think of great granddaddy Shub. That news is a study for a long-distance passenger rail-line connecting New York City to Houston, Texas, with multiple stops through East Tennessee, including Knoxville.
How cool, but also, how quaint. The stretch from New York to Chattanooga pretty much mimics the route and stops for Southern Railway’s Pelican that ran in the years after World War II until 1970. The Pelican ran from New Orleans to New York City and back. The difference then and the proposed route now is where the train heads after departing Chattanooga. The new line would head for Atlanta before cutting southwest to Montgomery, Alabama, then onto Mobile, Gulfport, New Orleans and Houston. The Pelican clipped across northwest Georgia to Fort Payne then on to Birmingham and Meridian, Mississippi, and south to New Orleans.
An ad for The Pelican, Knoxville Journal archives
Shub cut his teeth on steam engines. My Dad remembers being set up in one of his grandfather’s charges as a young child and that it scared him to death: ”they’re big and loud and hot.” Shub survived a disastrous derailment in February 1939 near Paint Rock, North Carolina, due to a rockslide caused by torrential rain. Unfortunately, his fireman on that trip, G.L. Painter, was killed in the incident. Neither he nor his engine were harmed in November 1944 when a motorist crashed into him at Bernard Avenue.
In his later years though, Shub spent his time running a leg of the Pelican. Southern had another train that rain from Memphis to Washington, D.C., the Tennessean. Shub would run it from Knoxville to Bristol, Virginia, then bring the Pelican south on its stretch back to Knoxville.
He had some cheek for drivers who took their chances trying to beat trains, especially one particular driver of a cream-colored car in Morristown:
I hope I don’t hit that fellow. But for the love of Mike, use some common sense, and go home all in one piece. Don’t be a fathead and think nothing can happen to you.
Sherwood Johnston died October 19, 1958, and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.
Sources: McClung Historical Collection digital archives/Knox County Library, The Knoxville News-Sentinel & The Knoxville Journal digital archives
