The Center for Railroad Photography & Art and Chicago author Sandra Jackson-Opoku have received 2022 research grants, each worth $2,500, from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society.
R&LHS President Robert Holzweiss said “the proposals could not be more different, but both were adjudged to be worthy of our support. The Center applies every year and often receives funding, and Ms. Jackson-Opoku is a multi-year applicant, but first-time awardee.”
Middleton Fellowship award
The CRP&A, in Madison, Wis., will use the grant from the William D. Middleton Research Fellowship to help sort, categorize, and conserve photo collections of longtime industry senior executives James McClellan of Norfolk Southern (1939-2016) and Railroad Development Chairman Henry Posner III, to make them accessible for public research.
Author of “My Life with Trains: Memoir of a Railroader” (Indiana University Press, 2017), McClellan was one of Trains Magazine’s “75 People You Should Know” in its 75th anniversary issue [November 2015]. He worked for the marketing departments of Southern Railway, New York Central, and Penn Central, and for the Federal Railroad Administration, Amtrak, the U.S. Railway Administration, the Association of American Railroads, and Norfolk Southern, retiring from NS as senior vice president of planning.
As chairman of the Pittsburgh-based RDC, Posner founded the Iowa Interstate Railroad and leads railway projects and operations on several continents, including holding the U.S. development rights for Pop-Up Metro, a battery-powered transit start-up technology that uses recycled London Underground rolling stock. Together with retired NS and Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman and longtime Pennsylvania businessman and preservationist Bennett Levin, Posner started the EBT Foundation, Inc., to acquire, preserve, and restore the historic narrow-gauge East Broad Top Railroad in central Pennsylvania.
The grant application of CRP&A Executive Director Scott Lothes noted the center’s collections now exceed 500,000 images. “Making them useful to [our] audiences requires research and due diligence as part of our archival processing efforts,” he wrote. “Inherent to the process of making these collections available is ensuring that their metadata are accurate, detailed, and searchable.”
White Fellowship award
Sandra Jackson-Opoku, recipient of the John H. White Jr. Research Fellowship, is a retired academic, literary scholar, and award-winning author of prose, poetry, and drama. She is working on research and revisions of Black Rice, a historical novel that explores centuries-long connections between China and people of African descent. She wrote: “The role of Cantonese immigrants in building the Transcontinental Railroad is well-documented. Less recognized is their work on southern railroads, and the resulting contact zones that developed between the Chinese immigrants and African American communities.”
She continued: “I’m interested in 19th-century Mississippi railroad culture, particularly as it relates to African American and Chinese American workers: divisions of labor, work songs and the Blues, culinary practices, sexual mores, class, gender and race. The completed work would explore, in the form of expressive literature, an interesting and under-examined field of railroad and labor history.”
Middleton (1928-2011) was a civil engineer, author, historian, and photographer who wrote more than 20 books and some 700 magazine articles, all on the topic of railroad or transit history and operations. White (1933-) is transportation curator and senior historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution. He has written more than a dozen books and some 150 articles on railroad history, much of it concentrated on locomotives, cars, and operating practices of the 19th century.
Deadline to apply for the 2023 Middleton and White research grants is June 30, 2023. Details can be found at this page on the R&LHS website.
