Remembering the Great Locomotive Chase 163 years later

“Big Shanty. Twenty minutes for breakfast!”

In Big Shanty, the raiders stole the General locomotive and three empty box cars. “For one moment of most intense suspense all was still — then a pull — a jar — a clang — and we were flying away on our perilous journey,” Raider William Pittenger later wrote in one of several accounts he published chronicling The Great Locomotive Chase. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

It was a rainy Saturday morning — April 12, 1862 — when a group of suspicious men boarded a northbound Western & Atlantic train at Marietta, Georgia. The men held tickets to varying points along the line, trying to make it seem as though they were not a part of one large group.

As the train wound its way around Kennesaw Mountain, the conductor alerted passengers, “Big Shanty. Twenty Minutes for breakfast!”

The train ground to a halt and most passengers disembarked to grab a quick breakfast at the Lacy Hotel, a two-story eating house the Western & Atlantic built in the years before the Civil War.