Best Friend of Charleston: America's First Steam Locomotive

The Best Friend of Charleston was a steam locomotive built at the West Point Foundry in New York in 1830 for the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company. On December 25, 1830, it pulled the first scheduled steam-powered passenger train in the United States out of Charleston on six miles of new track. Six months later, on June 17, 1831, its boiler blew up and killed the fireman, the first locomotive boiler explosion in American history. A working replica built in 1928 sits in a railroad shed in downtown Charleston, where you can see it for free.

Who built the Best Friend of Charleston?

The South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, chartered in 1827 to build a line from Charleston to Hamburg on the Savannah River, decided early to use steam instead of horses. Its chief engineer, Horatio Allen, pushed for it. The company ordered an engine from the West Point Foundry in New York City, which built it in the late summer of 1830. The engine weighed about 10,000 pounds and ran on four driving wheels, an 0-4-0 in the notation railroaders use, on track five feet wide. The South Carolina Encyclopedia calls it the first engine built in America for railroad service.

It was taken apart, shipped south by boat, and reassembled in Charleston, where its backers christened it in October 1830.

What happened on December 25, 1830?

On Christmas Day the Best Friend made its formal debut, pulling passenger cars out the first six miles of track from Charleston toward the Ashley River and Dorchester. One observer wrote that the passengers flew on the wings of the wind at fifteen to twenty miles per hour, which was faster than most of them had ever moved. Regular passenger runs followed on that short demonstration route while the rest of the line was built. The engine also carried mail and freight. A second locomotive, the West Point, joined it in March 1831 and never matched its speed.

The explosion of June 17, 1831

The company used enslaved men as laborers on the railroad and as firemen on its engines. In June 1831, while the Best Friend sat at a platform, its fireman, an enslaved man whose name the sources do not record, closed off the boiler’s safety valve. The usual explanation is that the hiss of escaping steam annoyed him; one account says he tied the valve down, another that he set a piece of lumber on it and sat on top. Either way, the pressure had nowhere to go. When the engine started moving again the boiler exploded and was thrown twenty feet into the air. The fireman was killed. The engineer, Nicholas Darrell, was scalded by some accounts and uninjured by others, and several workers were hurt.

Wikipedia gives the date as June 17, 1831. The South Carolina Encyclopedia says only June. Both agree it was the first boiler explosion of a locomotive in the United States.

The railroad responded in two ways. It wrote into its operating manual that engineers must stay at their stations at all times, and it hired conductors to handle the cars, passengers, and switches. And to settle nervous riders it began putting a flatcar stacked with cotton bales between the engine and the passenger cars, as a barrier.

The Phoenix

The company salvaged what it could from the wreck and built a new engine from the parts. It was named the Phoenix, and it is said to have run until the Civil War. The railroad kept faith with steam. By 1834 it had fifteen locomotives, and in October 1833 it finished the 136-mile line to Hamburg, then the longest in the world.

The 1928 replica, and where it is now

In 1928, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the railroad’s charter, the Southern Railway System, the successor to the original company, commissioned a full-size working replica of the Best Friend built from the original drawings. Norfolk Southern, the Southern’s successor in turn, gave the replica to the City of Charleston in 1971.

It has traveled some since. In 2005 the city lent it to Norfolk Southern, which refurbished it in Chattanooga and showed it outside the New York Stock Exchange on December 12, 2005. It then stood in the lobby of Norfolk Southern’s Atlanta headquarters for about six years before being trucked back to Charleston; sources give the return as October 2013 or October 2014. In 2014 the city opened the Best Friend of Charleston Museum in a nineteenth-century railroad shed between Ann and John Streets, behind the Charleston Visitor Center at the upper end of the historic district. The museum is free, city-owned, and draws about 5,000 visitors a year. The street address commonly given is 23 Ann Street.

A second full-size replica is on exhibit at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.

Visiting

The museum sits directly behind the downtown Visitor Center. Hours vary; check with the Visitor Center before you go. There is no admission charge. From there it is about twenty-five miles up the Ashley to Dorchester, where the first trains were headed, and roughly an hour’s drive to St. George, which exists because the line kept going.

The engine ran six months. The railroad it started ran for seventy years under its own name and still carries freight. The fireman’s name was not written down anywhere that has survived.

The line and its stations are covered on the county history page, and the station that became St. George has its own page. The dispatches do not go into Charleston often, but when they do, this is the kind of thing they go for. See the county map for where the track runs.

The Best Friend of Charleston: The First Train, and the First Boiler Explosion