Most students at ETSU are familiar with the Reece Museum and know of the fine visual art displayed there, but many are surprised to learn that our campus has its very own railroad museum. The George L. Carter Museum, established in 2007, is open from 10am-3pm every Saturday.
I had been wanting to visit the museum for months, but I wanted to bring my older brother, a life-long train buff. So, on October 1, my brother came for a visit and the two of us walked over to the train museum.
Inside, we found entire rooms filled with model railways and train memorabilia, historical documents, newspaper articles, photographs, and display cases which held items used by local passenger trains in days gone by. Train layouts were even modeled after railroads in east Tennessee and western North Carolina, including the Tweetsie Trail along the Doe River Gorge and even pieces of historic Johnson City. The details of the models were carefully constructed, aiming for accuracy.
Towns along the railroad were recreated based on pictures of those same places in the 1910s to 1930s. People in the photographs had even been placed in the model railways.
One of the museum directors pointed out the figures of a minute family standing in front of a tiny wooden building. Beside the display was the black and white photograph from 1916 by which the placement of the figures was inspired. The director took special note of the little girl from both the image and the display. That six-year-old girl, he told my brother and I, is now 106 years old. Every fall she comes to visit the museum and sees her young self standing along the railroad tracks with her family. "I was wearing a red dress that day," she always points out. The people who work in the George L. Carter Railroad Museum intend to correct this mistake.
Railroads played a huge part in shaping modern-day east Tennessee, and without railroad mogul George L. Carter, original land downer for our campus, East Tennessee State University wouldn't exist today. Visiting the Carter Railroad Museum is a fun and interesting way to delve into local history. I would recommend it to any ETSU student, train buff, or resident of the southern Appalachians.
