NEW YORK — The St. Louis Mercantile Library’s Barriger Railroad Collection is the source of an exhibition, “Travelers, Tracks and Tycoons: The Railroad in American Legend and Life,” now on view at the Grolier Club in New York City.
The exhibit, which includes more than 150 items , celebrates the 200th anniversary of railroading’s first decade in America. Curated by Nicholas Fry, who has overseen the Barriger Collection since 2012, it includes landmark books, technical publications, pamphlets and posters, artwork and sheet music, artifacts, maps, and other objects to chronicle the development of the railroads in North America and the changes they brought.
Items on display include one of the earliest commercial representations of railroad equipment in the continent; a unique set of the Pacific Railroad Surveys; photographs by Andrew Russell and Alexander Gardner documenting the construction of the first transcontinental railroads; an extremely rare diary from one of the civil engineers working on the Union Pacific in 1869; the “Whip-Poor-Will Call” whistle made for Casey Jones; children’s books on trains; and artwork by Leslie Ragan and others that celebrates and promotes rail travel.
The exhibit, which opened in May, is on display through July 30 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th St., New York. For more information on the Grolier Club and visiting the exhibit, visit the Grolier Club website.
The items on display represent only a small portion of the Barriger collection, started by railroad executive John W. Barriger, III (1899-1976), who amassed a personal library of over 10,000 volumes and hundreds of boxes of archival materials. After his death, the collection was donated to the St. Louis Mercantile Library, becoming the nucleus of the John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library Collection. In the late 1990s, the Library affiliated with the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and the Barriger Collection moved with it. More on the Barriger Library is available here.
Please note that the Grolier Club is at 47 East 60th Street not 57.
They library has a Flickr account with almost 50,000 photos in it from John W. Barriger, III’s albums. https://www.flickr.com/photos/barrigerlibrary/
The collections of the GM&O and the Milwaukee Road historical associations are part of the library. As a railfan, to visit the JWB library is like a little kid going to a candy store.