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Co. A., 3rd Eng. Regt. Railroad Bridge Repairs |
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Details of the operations of Confederate Engineer Regiments in support of railroads are very hard to find. Fortunately, we had the informative letters of one Company Captain to his wife, which had been preserved as late as 1963 by a descendent. Below is my summation of his railroad work from those letters, by way of an article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. |
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Richard Calvin McCalla was born in 1826 in Chester District, South Carolina. His practical engineer experience began in 1847 when he took a job as a rodman on the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad construction project. By the end of the five year job, he had advanced to the position of Principal Assistant to the Chief Engineer. In 1853, he married Margaret Eliza Lewis of Lewis' Turn Out, Chester District, some 35 miles south of Charlotte, N. C. From then to 1861, he served as engineer for various railroad construction projects in North Carolina and East Tennessee. When the war started, he was the Chief Engineer of the Cincinnati, Cumberland Gap & Charleston Railroad and was living with his family in Morristown, Tenn. |
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McCalla was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant of the Miner and Sapper Company in East Tennessee in the Spring of 1862. His specific work during the next year is not known, but his background probably saw him doing railroad repair jobs in East Tennessee. His surviving letters first mention his activities when he arrived on the Chickamauga battlefield in time to be involved in the battle on September 20, 1863. On October 21, he took two companies (one his Company A) of Engineers to Charleston, Tenn. to build a pontoon bridge and a railroad trestle bridge, probably on the Hiwassee River. Work was night and day and in heavy rainfall. Confederate reverses in the area and the enemy destruction of many bridges caused Capt. McCalla to be sent to Zollicofer (formerly Union), a station eleven miles south-west of Bristol, on the East Tennessee & Virginia RR. His company completed the bridge there in a few week and moved down eight miles to Carter' Station, where they built a bridge across the Watauga River. Then it was on to Lick Creek (location unknown). From Lick Creek, on February 2, 1864, McCalla sent his wife the following: " We will close this bridge in three or four days. In a week from today we shall have the cars to Morristown {22 miles north-east of Strawberry Plains, on the East Tennessee & Virginia RR} and considering that every bridge on the road with only one exception was destroyed by the enemy or our own men, I think it has been rebuilt in an astonishingly short time and the Eng. troops deserve some credit at least. Genl. Longstreet now holds the country within a few miles of Knoxville, including Strawberry Plains. I suppose we shall have to go forward with our road repairs to our front lines." However McCalla did not go to the front; while at Russellville (five miles northeast of Morristown), he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Department of East Tennessee by Longstreet (but with no rank or pay increase). With his new title, he was sent to Carter's Station to build more substantial railroad bridges over the Holston and Watauga Rivers at Zollicoffer and Carter's Stations. The Chief Engineer spent about a month directing the construction of the permanent bridges at Zollicoffer and Carter's. The work at Carter's was interrupted by an enemy attack, which his men repulsed with little difficulty. Shortly after the attack, McCalla took his company to Glade Springs and Saltville (both on the Virginia & Tennessee RR) to repair damage which the raiders had inflicted there. After repairing the Saltville damage he was sent to repair the road and rebuild the New River Bridge, at Radford, Va. eighty-five miles north-east of Saltville. This bridge was 780 feet long and was one of the largest projects he had ever taken. He was in charge of the entire work and had a large force of hands on the work. He did not get to finish the bridge before being ordered to repair the road recently destroyed between Salem and Lynchburg, a sixty mile stretch of road. He established his camp forty-five miles south of Lynchburg, near current Roanoke. He quickly repaired the road between Salem and Lynchburg, but the rebuilding of the Little Otter River Bridge took till August 13, 1864. When that bridge was finished, the force returned to the Radford bridge project. At this point, the letters cease to detail his activities. We know that his wife and children had fled their Tennessee home and were living near his wife's old home in South Carolina. In late 1864, McCalla was addressed in Charlotte, N. C. and appears to have ended the war there. |
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McCalla's war record shows him directing the building of bridges or other major engineering projects at seventeen different sites. He built bridges from Chickamauga Creek, near Chattanooga, Tenn. to Little Otter River, near Lynchburg, Va., a distance of more than four hundred miles. He built mostly pole trestle and permanent trestle railroad bridges and at least one pontoon bridge. In some locations he also repaired railroad tracks and telegraph lines. He employed mostly soldiers and his men used simple tools and equipment. |
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Based on "The Civil War in East Tennessee as Reported By a Confederate Railroad Bridge Builder," Robert Partin, Tennessee Historical Quarterly #22 (1963), pp 238-258. |