Gulf and Ship Island Railroad
The coup Hardy achieved in overseeing completion of the Ponchartrain Bridge and securing funding to complete the NO&NERR brought a measure of regional fame. Railroad men (and those who wanted to be) throughout The Magnolia State courted him for their boards of directors. In 1880, Hardy joined longtime railroad financiers and fellow Confederate veterans, William Clark Falkner and William Wirt Adams, to revive and revise the lapsed charter for the narrow gauge Ship Island, Ripley, and Kentucky Railroad. With Fallkner's support, Hardy accepted the presidency of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad in 1887, pending revision of that road's line to "some point on the Gulf of Mexico", and its change to standard gauge. An apocryphal tale says that while involved in surveys for the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, Hardy came up with the idea of a north-south railroad from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Jackson, Tennessee. While Hardy did not devise the entire railroad route on his own, he did make several important modifications to the lay of the line by changing the coast terminus and the route to cross his NO&NERR at a point he named "Hattiesburg," in honor of his wife, Hattie. Hardy determined Mississippi City, the county seat, was too far east of the natural deep-water harbor protected by Ship Island and proposed a new city, Gulfport, as the revised terminus.
Throughout his long involvement with the Gulf and Ship Island, Hardy lobbied investors and financiers throughout the north, west, and Europe to bring their capital to his project; eventually, the reality of Reconstruction economics got the best of him. Hardy's questionable use of the state's convicts, under the lease of Jones S. Hamilton, brought his first dose of bad press when a state commission, tasked with investigation of the convict lease system, revoked the company's lease in 1888. Also in that year, two of the railroad's most vocal supporters (William Falkner and Jones Hamilton) were involved in politically motivated assassinations. The final blow came with a financial collapse; Hardy's efforts to secure financing could not counter a wholesale panic, and the Gulf and Ship Island went into receivership in 1896.
Read more about this topic: William H. Hardy
Famous quotes containing the words gulf, ship, island and/or railroad:
“I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.”
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