The Walker branch: from Philippi, West Virginia, to the Atlantic Coast Line

The Charleston into which Amy Ann Perry FitzSimons was born in February 1888 was a city still rehearsing its Confederate past — St. Cecilia balls, Hampton Legion adjutants, the long tail of an antebellum gentry that had not quite agreed to lose. When she married on 20 October 1908, the man she took into the family did not share that grammar. James Pickens Walker Sr. — “Jamie” in his college pictures, “Puck” in family letters — was a West Virginian. His state had been carved out of Virginia in 1863 to remain in the Union; his father had enlisted at eighteen, “so preserve the Union.” The wedding was a small private armistice. The branch it opened runs through a different geography from the rest of this archive: mountain Appalachia, a Virginia men’s college, and four decades on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

Out of the West Virginia hills

The compiler wrote out the Walker pedigree at Book 2, p54. The line ran Samuel Walker and Elizabeth Wilson; their son Samuel Cadwalder Walker, born at Winchester, Virginia, in 1842; and his 1877 marriage to Emma Dee Pickens (b. 10 March 1856), daughter of the Barbour County farmer James Pickens, whose name would pass to a grandson. S. C. Walker had joined the Union army at eighteen; after the marriage he settled with Emma Dee on Fairfield, the Pickens farm in Overfield, West Virginia, that her father had given her in 1879. James Pickens Walker was born there on 27 April 1883. The infant in the christening gown and the white frame farmhouse with the brick end-chimney are both on Book 2, p53: “James Pickens Walker — born April 27th — 1883 … the back view of the house on Fairfield farm — at Overfield W. Va. — where James Pickens Walker was born.”

His elder sister Anna Strait Walker had been born at Clarksburg in May 1878; she appears with her mother on Book 2, p52. Amy’s continuation at Book 2, p55 records the family’s later movements — winters in Washington for schooling, summers on the farm, then a permanent town house bought in 1908 at 115 South Main Street, Philippi, where Emma Dee would live until her death in March 1933. S. C. Walker took a federal post as immigrant inspector and worked through Seattle, Los Angeles, Tacoma, and Havre, Montana, where he died in 1923; he too was brought home to Philippi.

A cabinet portrait of the son, made in Clarksburg in 1900, is captioned on Book 2, p57: “James Pickens Walker — 1900 — Rock Hill Academy.” The Rockville academy and Washington and Lee were the next two steps.

Washington & Lee, 1901–02

Washington and Lee at Lexington, Virginia, was one of the South’s prestige men’s colleges in the early twentieth century, with the romantic charge that came of housing Robert E. Lee’s tomb in its chapel. A West Virginia engineer’s son enrolled there in 1901 was stepping into a particular Southern social formation. He played fullback. The faded team photograph on Book 2, p46 shows eighteen young men in striped jerseys on a wooden grandstand; the pencil caption reads “Jamie — Pickens Walker — Full back varsity team — Washington & Lee Univ. 1901 — 1901–1903.” The 1902 varsity is on the next leaf at Book 2, p50. He graduated in engineering — the conventional preparation for the bottom rung of an American railroad career.

The Atlantic Coast Line years

He began in 1903 as a chainman (the newspaper typesetter rendered it “chairman” — see Book 2, p141) on a Baltimore & Ohio survey crew. The B. & O. engineering corps appears on Book 2, p52, captioned “James Pickens Walker — B. + O. Engineers. With B. + O. — 1903 – 1906.” In 1906 he moved south to the Atlantic Coast Line.

The Atlantic Coast Line was one of the great Southeastern carriers — Richmond through Wilmington, Florence, Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville to Tampa — headquartered at Wilmington, North Carolina, and later at Jacksonville. The civil-engineering ladder ran chainman, transitman, resident engineer, division engineer, assistant engineer, assistant superintendent, superintendent; Walker climbed all of it. His earliest Charleston posting placed him on a brick industrial building during the 1906–08 city and Navy Yard expansion — “This is the house that Puck built,” Amy captioned the photograph on Book 2, p58, recalling the year of her debut and the dance at which she first met him. By 1926 he had served as division superintendent at Charleston from 1 September 1915 to 1 August 1925, then briefly as superintendent of transportation at Jacksonville, and was being moved up to general superintendent of the Northern Division at Savannah, succeeding R. A. McCranie (Book 2, p122).

The Savannah years stretched from 1926 into the summer of 1933 and were the years of the Walker children’s childhood. Amy had borne three: James Pickens Walker Jr. (“Bo”), born 5 January 1912; Emma Dee (“Dee”), born 18 October 1915 and named for her West Virginia grandmother; and Mary Ann, born 8 June 1918. The family bought a brick veneer house in Ardsley Park in April 1927 (Book 2, p122), and Walker took up the civic life of a Southeastern railroad executive: Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, the Oglethorpe Club, the Savannah Golf Club, the Chatham Council of the Boy Scouts, and the Savannah Union Station Co. (Book 2, p241). An A.C.L. freight traffic meeting at Savannah, eight men in suits and straw boaters, is on Book 2, p123.

In June 1933 the railroad consolidated its divisions, and Walker was elevated to general superintendent of the Southern Division at Jacksonville — succeeding the late McCranie a second time. The clippings on Book 2, p136 and Book 2, p137 record both Owen H. Page’s appointment as his Savannah successor and the testimonial dinner Coast Line employees held at the Hotel Savannah on the Walkers’ twenty-sixth wedding anniversary: a silver meat platter, a gravy bowl, and a bouquet for Mrs. Walker. The 1934 envelopes on Book 2, p138 — to Mrs. J. P. Walker at 112 E. 52nd Street, Savannah, struck through and forwarded to Yonges Island, S.C. — catch the transitional months. By 1935 the family was permanently in Florida.

He held the Jacksonville general superintendency for the rest of his career. The 1946 profile at Book 2, p141 — written after a testimonial dinner at which three hundred friends gave him a car, luggage, fishing tackle, golf clubs, and a scale model of his private Office Car 305 — records forty-three years on the railroad. During the First World War he had been terminal manager in Jacksonville under the U.S. Railroad Administration; he was also vice president of the Atlantic and East Coast Terminal Company and a director of the Tampa Union Station Company.

Back to Philippi

He died at Jacksonville on 19 November 1960. The condolence letter the Rev. James H. Brennan of the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Buckhannon, West Virginia, sent to Walker Jr. on 6 December — at Book 2, p253 — is annotated in a later hand: “This letter is referring to the funeral of James Pickens Walker Sr. who died in Jacksonville Fla. November 19, 1960 and was buried in Philippi, West Virginia.” A September 1960 letter to “Cousin Amy” hoping that “Cousin Puck is continuing to keep well” — at Book 2, p30 — is dated barely two months before the end.

The body went home, to the Barbour County cemetery where his father, his mother, and his sister Anna already lay. The Atlantic Coast Line had moved him through Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville; the marriage to Amy FitzSimons had grafted his mountain Union line onto a Lowcountry Confederate one; but the burial closed the long arc back to Overfield, where the boy in the christening gown had been photographed seventy-seven years before.