John W. Garrett

Born in Baltimore, on July 31, 1820, to merchant Robert Garrett (1783–1857) and his wife Elizabeth Stouffer Garrett (1791–1877). Like his elder brother Henry Garrett (1818-1867), John W. Garrett attended Boisseau Academy in Baltimore, essentially a prep school for Lafayette College. He attended the college in Easton, Pennsylvania, but never graduated.[1] His father Robert [Sr.], had come from Ireland as a young boy in 1801 with his parents and family, including his father who died at sea during the transit. The Garrett family also included a daughter, Elizabeth Garrett White (1827–1917).

John Work Garrett married Rachel Ann Harrisson (1823–1883), and the couple had four children, three of whom survived their parents: Robert Garrett (1847–1896), Thomas Harrison Garrett (1849–1888) and Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1854–1915). Their initial residence was on Fayette Street, in the heart of Baltimore's present business district.

At age 19 (in 1839) Garrett began working as a clerk and apprentice in his father's mercantile, banking and financial services firm, founded 1819, Robert Garrett and Company, (later Robert Garrett and Sons). He and his brother Henry learned the business from the ground up, as had their father, including how to tan leather from the teamster Alexander Sharp, how to salt pork and how to pack madder and Spanish whiting in barrels. While Henry remained in Baltimore, John Garrett headed west, seeking to expand trade over the mountains. His travels through Virginia into Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and beyond taught him that the key to Baltimore's commerce lay in the western states, whose trade came to eastern ports including Baltimore.

The Garrett company's initial fleet of Conestoga wagons carried food and supplies west over the old National Road, from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland and further to Ohio and the territorial capital at Vandalia, Illinois, or via the Ohio River toward the Mississippi River, or over the Cumberland Trail towards Kentucky and Tennessee. From their store then located on Howard Street, Robert Garrett and Company supplied western general stores with various goods, including flints, chocolate and chalk, and in turn received ginseng, snakeroot and whiskey.

As the brothers took over the business from their father, they sponsored new projects, building warehouses and hotels such as the Howard House and the Eutaw House on Baltimore's west side. With the end of the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, they expanded toward the new American Southwest and California, causing the largest steamship then ever built in Baltimore, "The Monumental City", which soon made regular runs down the Chesapeake Bay to New Orleans, and San Francisco. The company added to its fleet and expanded its mercantile and financial business to South America and Europe.

Share of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail-Road Company, issued October 14, 1879

Garrett began purchasing B&O Railroad stock early, when the railroad was competing with the newly completed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which paralleled the Potomac River from Georgetown near Washington, D.C., to Cumberland and the National Road. Virginia also subsidized canals and railroads which would connect with the National Road further along, in Wheeling. In its early years the B&O had a combination of private and public ownership, because it needed public grants and loans to both acquire right-of-way and build the railroad, but this also led to conflicts within the board. Of the 30 members of the B&O's board of directors, 18 were selected by the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore, who helped fund the construction. In 1854, the Baltimore City Council extended a five million dollars emergency loan to the struggling railroad's growing construction debt as the line pushed westward over the Appalachian Mountains. During the Panic of 1857, money became extremely tight.[2]

Brother Henry Garrett had been serving as a B&O director for some time and in 1847, John Work Garrett joined him. The local newspaper The Sun on November 17, 1858, reported on the extensive debate and controversy between those directors wishing to keep the line in private hands, and those representing the interests of the state and city governments. The meeting included an election, and by a vote of 16 to 14, Garrett was elected over incumbent executive Chauncy Brooks (1794-1880) of "Cloverdale", who represented the state interests. Following a motion by board member Johns Hopkins, (1795-1873), the largest stockholder since 1847 as well as chairman of the financial committee, Garrett became the B&O's new president. Hopkins, a Maryland native, had become a hardware wholesale merchant on South Charles Street and made his substantial fortune in Baltimore. The Garrett Company as well as the B&O also had strong ties to the London-based George Peabody & Company, and through their business interests, financier George Peabody (1795–1869).

The B&O got an early taste of the Civil War during abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal armory in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (in those days still part of Virginia). Garrett learned that raiders had stopped a train at Harper's Ferry, and sent a telegram to the U.S. Secretary of War.[2] Federal troops with U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee, (U.S. Army), from Arlington House, Virginia across the river from the Capital, were sent to put down the rebellion on a special B&O train.

Garrett had previously always considered the B&O to be a "Southern railroad", and had originally pro-South sympathies. However, his business sense, with possibly political and economic acumen (and his anger at seeing Confederates tearing up his railroad) made him side with the Union and the policies of President Abraham Lincoln. Under his direction, the B&O was instrumental in supporting the Federal government, as it was the main rail connection between Washington, D.C., and the northern and western states.[3] Garrett became a confidante of President Lincoln, and often accompanied him on his visits to battlefields in Maryland.[1] During the third Confederate invasion of the North in July 1864, B&O agents began reporting Confederate troop movements in western Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley and through Frederick, Maryland under General Jubal Early eleven days prior to what became the critical Battle of the Monocacy. Garrett had their intelligence passed to the U.S. War Department, particularly to Major General Lew Wallace (later noted author of the historical novel Ben Hur), who commanded the department responsible for defense of the area surrounding the national capitol. As battle preparations progressed, Garrett provided transport for Federal troops and munitions, and on two occasions President Lincoln contacted him directly for further information. Though Union forces lost this battle, the two-day delay allowed General Ulysses S. Grant, then campaigning further south and threatening the Confederate capital, Richmond and nearby Petersburg to detach several Federal regiments from his substantial forces and send them up north on the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River. They two days later thus repelled the Gen. Early's attack on Washington at the Battle of Fort Stevens on the capital's northwestern outskirts of the capital. After the battle, President Lincoln commended Garrett as "The right arm of the Federal Government in the aid he rendered the authorities in preventing the Confederates from seizing Washington and securing its retention as the Capital of the Loyal States."[4]

In 1865, Garrett organized the funeral train that took the assassinated president's corpse from Washington to Springfield, Illinois. The several-week procession included stops and ceremonies in Baltimore; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia; New York City; Albany, New York; Buffalo, New York; Cleveland; Columbus; Indianapolis; and Chicago.[5]

After the war, Garrett acquired three gunboats that had been used in the blockade service and refitted them into packet boats, establishing the first regular line service from Baltimore to Liverpool, Pennsylvania. He was also associated with several telegraph companies.[1] Garrett also expanded the B&O by purchasing competing railroads in Ohio and Virginia. The B&O had reached Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before the war, where it competed with the Pennsylvania Railroad for western traffic. However, the route west from Pittsburgh continued through the Appalachian Mountains, which raised costs as well as engineering headaches. The easier route west, along either bank of the Ohio River, was initially owned by competing railroads. Garrett bought the Central Ohio Railroad, which reached Sandusky, Ohio, from which a relatively level expanse continued through Ohio into Indiana and Illinois. In the early 1870s, Garrett expanded the B&O westward from Chicago Junction (later Willard, Ohio) through Nappanee, Indiana, reaching "Baltimore Junction" at the edge of Chicago on November 15, 1874.[6]

Grave of Garrett in Green Mount Cemetery

Garrett survived his wife by almost a year. He died on September 26, 1884, at his summer home on the grounds of the Deer Park Hotel, which he, Senator Henry Gassaway Davis (a former B&O employee) and the B&O Railroad had developed in Garrett County, Maryland after the Civil War. Garrett was buried beside her, as well as his parents in Baltimore's historic Green Mount Cemetery.

Many of his B&O papers are held by the Smithsonian Institution;[16] other family papers are held by the Library of Congress.[17]

With succeeding generations, the Garrett family business expanded in railroads, shipping, and banking. Nine years after the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904, the firm marked the city's (and financial district's) revival by building a landmark skyscraper of thirteen stories (tall for those days) designed by noted architects J.B. Noel Wyatt and William G. Nolting in a variety of then popular styles including the Chicago, Commercial/Vernacular and Renaissance Revival styles at the southwest corner of Water and South Streets. The firm, led by his descendants, endured into 1974, when it merged with its former rival, Alex. Brown & Sons. In 1981, a law firm which had long leased space in the building merged with another firm, Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger and Hollander, purchased The Garrett Building, and began and completed a substantial historically-minded restoration and renovation, which included placing the building on the National Register of Historic Places.[18]

Places named in Garrett's honor include:

• Garrett, Indiana[19]
• Garrett County, Maryland, the last of the state's 23 counties to be established, in 1872
• Garrett Island in the (Susquehanna River)
• Garrett Park, (Montgomery County)
• Garrett, Pennsylvania.

The Garrett Park recreation area in Baltimore City's Brooklyn neighborhood, on East Patapsco Avenue, between Second and Third Streets, was donated and named for John Work Garrett's grandson Robert Garrett, a member of the 1896 Olympics American team in Athens, Greece and a long-time recreation and parks leader in Baltimore City.

• List of railroad executives

• Media related to John W. Garrett at Wikimedia Commons