Eighty tons of railroad history and the West Texas’ cotton industry now sets restored at the Bayer Museum of Agriculture. A Pullman sleeper car was owned by Arch Underwood, a significant player in America’s cotton compress industry.
Underwood’s contacts with Santa Fe Railway allowed him to hitch the Pullman to the end of a train and take the entire family on cross-country trips.
Granddaughter Jane Henry of Lubbock says the restoration effort took about three years once the car was moved from the Underwood Trinity Warehouse at 26th and Avenue C where it had been for decades. Underwood bought the car in 1950, 25 years after it had been built.
“It’s thrilling, it really is thrilling. Because riding the train was such a fabulous part of our growing up experience, and we haven’t had a passenger train in Lubbock since 1966 or something like that. And as far as I can remember, the only ambition I ever had in my life was to be a porter, and I think that’s why I became an architect. I loved all the secret little- you know, how the beds pull down, how they make up and how they used every inch of that car, nothing was wasted. I think that that, just the feeling of being in that space is so unique and our community is so deprived not having had access to it.”
Henry says her family wanted to do something to spotlight the car – which at one time was part of the 20th Century Limited train that traveled between New York City and Chicago - but found little interest until the ag museum location became an option.
“The last family trip was in the 60s and the family has been trying to find something to do with it for years since then. We offered it to Tech, we offered it to the Railroad Museum in Amarillo, we thought about letting it go back to Athens where granddaddy came from, so it had all kinds of feelers out and nobody was very interested. The Ag Museum is the perfect place for it because it was related to cotton. And so when the Heritage Society decided they wanted to really look into restoring it, that was the ideal place for it to be, and so it has all kind of worked out.”
The Lubbock Heritage Society spearheaded the effort. Underwood family members contributed to move the car and a portion of the restoration costs. Several area groups also contributed: The JT and Margaret Talkington Foundation, the Lubbock Area Foundation, the CH Foundation and the Community Foundation of West Texas.
Henry says the Pullman car, which her grandfather named Fair Deal in homage to Harry S. Truman, now looks far different than when she traveled in it. The family traveled to Athens, Texas, numerous times and twice to California, the first one when Disneyland opened in 1956.
“What the Heritage Society has done is take back the first compartment to what it looked like in the 1920s, when it had full wood everywhere. Then the next compartments are of the 30s and the last ones are in the 50s, the way it looked when Granddaddy bought it. But he had upholstered everything. He had upholstered all the fabric with just stuff to protect it, from us probably. And when we were reinstalling the windows, one of the men put his elbow through the upholstery and we discovered that all the 1925 fabric was intact! So the way the car looks today is far more elegant than it did when we were riding around on it!”
Prominent US politicians of the 1950s from Texas – House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and the US Rep George Mahon -- each have a Pullman room named after them.
The Pullman car is an educational exhibition. Henry says there will be tours of it by a docent at the ag museum. And, she says, there are early discussions about buying a small train station currently in Shallowater.
“If we could get that little station, then that could be part of our display, and part of the entrance. There’s no air conditioning but there are ways that they would put ice underneath and as the wind blew over the ice you could see the vents above, and of course there was heat. So I think the duct work possibly could be utilized without damaging it. I’m not the engineer here, so I don’t know.”