Missouri bicentennial: 'Frisco' railroad and its Chaffee connection

This is the 11th in a series of articles with Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation board chairman Frank Nickell, an emeritus faculty member of Southeast Missouri State University, commenting on Show Me State history on the 200th anniversary of Missouri being received as America's 24th state in 1821.

The St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, commonly known as the "Frisco," operated from 1876 to 1980 when it was purchased and absorbed into what is now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway.

Southeast Missouri was well-represented along the Frisco line.

"If you watch trains going through downtown Cape Girardeau, you're seeing the BNSF," Nickell said.

It is Chaffee, 12 miles southwest of Cape Girardeau along Highway 77, that arguably has the greatest claim locally to the Frisco.

"Chaffee was built for that railroad," said Ronnie Eichhorn, president of the Chaffee Historical Society, noting the Frisco needed a switching station and maintenance facilities between St. Louis -- where the old Frisco was born -- and Memphis, Tennessee.

"They switched crews at Chaffee," noted Nickell, adding, "there were people in the Scott County town who lived their whole lives as Frisco Railroad employees."

Echoing Eichhorn, the historian agreed it is impossible to overestimate the importance of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway to Chaffee.

"Before the (Frisco) roundhouse and repair sheds were built, the land was all fields," Nickell said.

"(Chaffee) was made by the railroad, was nurtured by the railroad and owed its life to the railroad," he added.

Chaffee's name

Both Eichhorn and Nickell agree there is less than complete unanimity on where the 1.85-square-mile city with an estimated 2,900 residents got its name.

On June 20, 1905, John Witt, a Sikeston, Missouri, farmer, sold 1,800 acres to the Chaffee Real Estate Co. of St. Louis.

"Our city is platted with some of the names of the officers of that company," Eichhorn said, specifically pointing out Yoakum Street and Black Avenue in Chaffee.

Another school of thought attributes the city's appellation to a military figure.

"The city may have been named for Adna Chaffee," said Eichhorn, referring to a distinguished U.S. Army lieutenant general (1842-1914) who served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China.

Background

According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, the Frisco began as a branch of the Pacific Railroad and laid about 5,000 miles of track, mostly in Missouri and Oklahoma.

In the 20th century, missouri2021.org reports, a second main line was developed from Kansas City, Missouri, to Memphis, later to Birmingham, Alabama, and ultimately to the Gulf of Mexico.

St. Louis served as Frisco's business headquarters while Springfield, Missouri, became the railroad's operational hub.

"A museum in Springfield has pictures of every locomotive Frisco ever had and almost all the boxcars," Nickell said, noting the Frisco's operators seemed to have a penchant for fun.

"Quite whimsically, the Frisco would name locomotives for horses which won the Kentucky Derby," he added, noting Derby winner Citation was one such three-year old thoroughbred so honored by the railroad. Citation would go on to win the 1948 Triple Crown of horse racing and was the first horse to earn a million dollars in competition.

Influence of the Frisco

In Shrewsbury, Missouri, near St. Louis, a Frisco railway crossing and trestle along Route 66, the so-called "Mother Road," sports a sign reading "Ship it on the Frisco," readable to all traveling westward along the legendary highway.

Veryl Riddle, a graduate of Campbell High School in Dunklin County, later a distinguished attorney with the Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis, also played a role in the railroad's 104-year history.

As a young man, Riddle (1921-2011) had been a passenger on the Frisco and the railroad's path influenced the lawyer's early mapping of some aviation routes, Nickell suggested.

The Frisco had stopped carrying passengers by the end of 1970, concentrating on revenue freight until its eventual absorption by Burlington Northern 10 years later.

"Chaffee is a very significant stop along the Frisco; that's its history," concluded Nickell.