Odes to Adair Park · Track 3 · middle

Mechanicville: Where the Rail Workers Lived

Mechanicville — the rail-worker district immediately north of Adair Park, where the African-American Pullman porters and rail yard workers built shotgun houses and bungalows in the late 1800s-early 1900s. The community that fed into the early Adair Park lots. Repton walks the rail-worker neighborhood with quiet attention.

Lyrics

[Intro]
I walk the grid just north of the park.
Where the shotgun houses hold back the dark.
This was here before the plat was signed.
A memory the surveyors left behind.

[Verse 1]
The Sanborn map from 1892 shows the tin roofs.
Aligned in rows, fireproof and sun-proof.
Heart-pine porches, narrow and deep.
Secrets the railroad men would keep.
Front door looks straight through to the back.
A clear shot through from the railroad track.
For the evening breeze and the morning light,
and the men walking home in the fading night.

[Chorus]
The Southern Yard breathes out its steam.
A working man's American dream.
A straight line home when the day is done.
Mechanicville, beneath the Atlanta sun.

[Verse 2]
The Pullman ledgers from 1895.
Keeping a man, and his family, alive.
Polishing silver for a stranger's meal,
the smooth, heavy weight of the turning wheel.
And the section gangs with their mauls and spikes,
walking the lines on the hottest nights.
5:45 a.m., 1907.
The smell of coal smoke, a taste of heaven or hell, depending on the day.

[Chorus]
The Southern Yard breathes out its steam.
A working man's American dream.
A straight line home when the day is done.
Mechanicville, beneath the Atlanta sun.

[Bridge]
The 1900 census, it doesn't name the wives.
Just a number, counting up the lives.
And the railroad YMCA in a 1912 directory,
a ghost building now, lost to memory.
The payrolls mention laborers from Mexico and Spain,
names never written, lost in the rain.
This was the anchor, the root in the ground,
before George Adair ever came around.

[Outro]
The whistle echoes off the roofs of tin.
Supper is ready. Come on in.
Just the sound of a train on a distant track.
And the echo of a call that won't come back.