Rail Tracks: Veins of Commerce

Lyrics

Can you hear that?
Before the brick, before the street.
Just the Georgia red clay.
And one man, with a chain and a stake.

The year is eighteen thirty-seven.
Just a few days shy of Christmas.
December twenty-first.
Chief Engineer Stephen Harriman Long.
He finds the spot.
The perfect ridgeline.
And with a metallic clang, he drives the zero milepost.
Not a city yet.
Just a name for the end of the line.
Terminus.

Then came the sound of hammers on iron.
The smell of creosote sharp in the air.
Coal smoke painting the sky a different color.
The Western & Atlantic, a steel river,
carved right through the forest.
Hardy Pace, in his cabin, must have watched it all.
This new thing, this loud, hungry thing.

And the iron veins began to beat.
A new heart for a new town.
The clack and the squeal, the engine's heat.
From a single stake driven down.
This was the pulse.
This was the blood.
Flowing in, flowing out, a steel flood.
Yeah, the iron veins began to beat.

The switching yards became a metal puzzle.
Freight depots stood like open hands,
ready to catch whatever the country sent.
Cotton bales, lumber, bolts of cloth.
Filling the warehouses that line these streets now.
All of it arriving on those parallel lines.
The promise of commerce, humming on the rails.

Jonathan Norcross, he saw it.
He called it the future.
More than just a depot, more than a yard.
He saw a crossroads.
From a single point marked on a map,
a city could breathe.
A city could grow.

And even now, when the stadium roars,
when the art stroll fills the sidewalks...
Listen.
You can still hear it.
The ghost of a whistle on the night air.
The hum in the steel.
The veins are still here.