| Annual Report of the East Tennessee &
Georgia RR |
| as of July 1, 1861, |
| President's Report |
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| Office East Tenn. & GA. Rail Road Co. |
| Knoxville, Sept. 4, 1861 |
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To the Stockholders of the East Tennessee & Georgia Rail Road
Company:
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| Your Road being a completed
one, and nothing in the management of its affairs of an unsettled or
speculative character, in making the annual report of our stewardship
we shall confine ourselves to the actual operations of the Company,
exhibiting in figures, in the most condensed manner possible, so as to
be intelligible, the results of the work for the year. To this end we
have caused to be prepared and printed for your information a series
of tables, which we hope you will find interesting and not altogether
unsatisfactory. |
| These figures will exhibit
the fact that we have paid $26,000 of your funded debt, and have
$14,000 of a singing fund in the hands of the Commissioners; also,
that $6,000 of your Company bonds which were hypothecated have been
redeemed, and that your floating debt has been greatly reduced during
the fiscal year. We may add that since the close of the year we have
paid all of $70,000 of your debts, and have redeemed $22,000 more of
your hypothecated bonds. |
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A portion of your liabilities and assets still remaining
unsettled are North of "Mason and Dixon's line." You owe a
debt there of less than ten thousand dollars, and there is due you
from same section within a fraction of eleven thousand dollars. So, in
the summary closing up of financial matters between the sections our
Northern friends have got the better of us to the extent of about one
thousand dollars. We are anxious, however, that our creditors -- one
in New Jersey and the other in Pennsylvania -- should be paid, and we
would be gratified to know that they had attached the amount in the
hands of those indebted to us, and thus balanced accounts.
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In times past you have been largely indebted to the Banks
of East Tennessee, the Banks of Augusta, Ga., the Exchange Bank of
Columbia, South Carolina, and the Bank of the State of Tennessee, at
Nashville, for material aid kindly extended in time of great need. It
is with much pleasure that we now inform you that all those debts,
created in the midst of great financial troubles, have been fully and
honorably paid off, and that no Bank or individual has had the
slightest cause to complain of the fidelity of your Company in
promptly and satisfactorily meeting all its obligations;
notwithstanding, you can truthfully say no Company has ever, in its
progress of construction encountered greater financial difficulties or
a more bitter and unnatural opposition.
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In times like the present, when the elements of
prosperity are so little under our control, it is not best to
speculate as to the future; and while we may to-day refer to reports
and predictions made by us on similar occasions, and do now exhibit
facts and figures in verification of their correctness, we do not
consider it would be either wise or profitable to attempt to draw
aside the veil that conceals the future of this important highway. Let
us rather be content to grapple with the present, and to use this
"Iron power" in such way as will most conduce to the general
welfare of our common country. Let each member, not only of this
corporation, but of the community in which it exists, consider well of
its vast importance, in its public as well as its individual benefits,
and determine for himself whether it shall be yielded up to be
destroyed by invading mercenaries, or whether, in common with other
rights and privileges pertaining to a civilized people, it shall be
protected from all assaults, no matter under what guise they may come,
and transmit intact to our posterity.
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Respectfully submitted, for the Directors
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C. Wallace
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Pres't.
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