"Theorizing 'Rights-of-Way:' Race, Railroads, and Traversable Property in Antebellum Ferguson and St. Louis"

• In Event: Race and Identity Making Past and Present

Description for Program

This paper undertakes a historical analysis of Ferguson, Missouri before its formal incorporation (1838-1894) and investigates how the development of railway infrastructure intersected with the institution of slavery in the region. It interrogates the city’s beginning as a train station (“Ferguson Station”) on the North Missouri Railroad (NMRR) and a settlement for small, slaveholding farmers. The essay centers on a notable figure in the town’s history, Thomas T. January. A director of the NMRR, January was a prominent landowner and slaveholder. His famed plantation, January Farm, anchored aristocratic life in the region and supported rail operations at Ferguson Station. Engaging archival documents, maps, local folklore, and cultural rumors about January, I ponder the relationship between his farm and the railroad station to make larger claims about race and railroads in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the legal concept of rights-of-way that authorized the installation of iron rails across St. Louis County’s fertile landscape had another social function. Rights-of-way reified property relations that stabilized ideas of race, slavery, and freedom amid the social turbulence of the antebellum period. Underscoring the racialization of modern mobility, I showcase how railway infrastructure enshrined white modern subjectivity and devalued black personhood.

Author

• Rashad Arman Timmons, University of California, Santa Barbara