Rolling along U.S. Route 70…we arrive in Spencer

With the Burke County town of Valdese now in the rearview mirror, our journey along U.S. Route 70 through the Piedmont section of North Carolina passes through Catawba, Iredell and Rowan counties. 

Interesting towns and cities along the way include Hickory, Conover, Claremont, Statesville, Cleveland and Salisbury. 

The Route 70 “heritage trail itinerary,” picks back up again in Spencer, located just beyond Salisbury.

 

Spencer began as a railroad town. Now, it’s known as the home of the North Carolina Transportation Museum, which interprets all forms of transportation history from dugout canoes to airliners. It’s located on the property of Southern Railway’s Spencer Shops and features the largest collection of rail relics in the Carolinas. 

The transportation museum is a site to see, operated by the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

 

The Southern Railway Company was formed in 1894, acquiring several regional railroads. The mastermind of the operation was Samuel Spencer, company president.

 

He soon determined that the Southern Railway needed to build a “back shop” service facility on the eastern main line, located equidistant between Washington D.C., and Atlanta – in order to switch locomotives, refuel, inspect and service the equipment. 

Rowan County’s largest landholder at the time was John Steele Henderson, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1884-94. He got wind of Spencer’s plan and “began secret negotiations with the railroad company to help them buy land for the proposed facility” at a bargain price.

 

On Aug. 19, 1896, dignitaries gathered for the opening ceremony of the Spencer Shops. To attract workers, Southern Railway created 500 lots for “employee housing.” The lots were $100 apiece. The deeds contained restrictive architectural covenants. The town also took the name of Spencer and was incorporated in 1905. 

The Spencer Shops once employed nearly 3,000 people. The late Charlie Peacock, a retired Spencer Shops trainman, once told the Journal of Commerce: “Every time you come to Spencer and look around and see the vastness of it, I think you have to remember the great contributions the railroads made when they finally tied the nation together with two ribbons of steel.”

 

Spencer Shops, one of the finest repair facilities in the world, buzzed with activity while work crews serviced 100 steam locomotives a day, the Journal reported. The shops’ multiple track system could hold 265 railway cars at a time. A massive crane inside the machine shop could lift a 150-ton steam locomotive.

 

With the advent of diesel locomotives in the late 1940s, the need for Spencer Shops waned. 

“The first time I ever saw one of them (diesel locomotives) pull in here, I knew it was going to be the end of the steam locomotive,” Peacock said. 

He was right. In 1953, Southern Railway became the first major railroad in the United States to convert totally to diesel-powered locomotives, ending its rich history in the “golden age of steam.” 

Southern Railway closed the main repair shops in 1960; just a handful of workers stayed on through the 1970s to perform minor repairs. 

In the late 1970s, all work at Spencer Shops came to a halt when Southern Railway opened a new diesel complex in Linwood in Davidson County. 

With the end of Spencer’s operational existence, talk immediately began of turning the complex into a museum. 

In September 1977, Southern Railway presented the first deed of Spencer Shops’ property “as a gift to the people of North Carolina.”