N.C. railroad men serve the Confederacy in Civil War years

Charles Frederick Fisher regained respect among the stockholders of the North Carolina Railroad in 1859, when he was reelected company president almost unanimously by the board of directors, reported historian Dorothy Fremont Grant. 

This election marked Fisher’s vindication, as the controversy over his track record as manager of the rail line, which had been aroused by State Sen. Jonathan Worth, subsided. 

Fisher gained a credible ally in Sewall Lawrence Fremont, who was chief engineer and superintendent of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. The men became close friends. 

“When hostilities began between North and South, Fisher, who was a native of Salisbury, N.C., immediately volunteered for Confederate service,” Grant said. “Elected colonel of the sixth North Carolina Regiment, he was killed in the Battle of First Manassas at Bull Run in Virginia on July 21, 1861 (at age 44), while serving under Gen. Thomas Lanier Clingman.”

Col. Fisher

 

Fremont was born in Vermont and grew up in New Hampshire. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1841. He resigned from the Army in 1854 and assumed full management of the Wilmington and Weldon later that year. 

With the outbreak of the Civil War, North Carolina Gov. John W. Ellis appointed Fremont colonel of the North Carolina militia. With the Confederate States Army, Col. Fremont assumed full command of the coastal defenses from the New River at Jacksonville to the South Carolina state line. 

In that role, Col. Fremont planned the fortification on the Cape Fear River below Wilmington and named it Fort Fisher in honor of his fallen friend Charles Frederick Fisher.

“Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee commended the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad as the ‘lifeline of the Confederacy,’” Grant said. 

 

“Through a Southern-sympathizer friend in Massachusetts, Col. Fremont brought into Wilmington from Nassau (in The Bahamas) rails and other needed hardware made in Northern steel mills to keep the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad in efficient running order.” 

Fort Fisher fell to Union forces on Jan. 15, 1865, hastening the demise of the Confederacy.

 

After the war, Fremont returned to civilian life and rejoined the railroad. One of the towns served by the Wilmington and Weldon in Wayne County was Nahunta. 

In 1869, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to rename the community Fremont, in recognition of Col. Fremont’s service to the Confederacy, Grant said. Fremont died in 1886 at age 69.

 

Meanwhile, Fisher’s old nemesis Jonathan Worth left his senate post to become state treasurer in the administration of Gov. Zebulon Baird Vance in 1862. 

Gov. Zance

Worth had the unhappy duty of issuing notes and bonds to finance the state’s share of its war debt. While treasurer, Worth issued $8.5 million in notes, and $5.2 million were outstanding at the end of the Civil War. Additionally, war bonds totaling more than $13 million were issued. At the end of the war, all of the state’s war debt was repudiated. 

Historians said Worth did “the best he could to safeguard the financial resources of the people of North Carolina during troubled times.” 

As Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces were approaching Raleigh near the end of the war, Gov. Vance charged Worth with the duty of safeguarding the state archives.

Gen. Sherman

 

Worth shipped valuable documents and other treasured items off to be warehoused at the North Carolina Railroad’s Company Shops repair facility in Alamance County, a complex of numerous buildings that were used for the maintenance and construction of the railroad’s rolling stock. 

No one would think of looking for the state archives there.