Ruins of Northeastern Depot

Railroads started taking off in America during the 1830s, and Charleston participated in all the activity. There was the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston, the Blue Ridge line, and the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which stretched 755 miles west to the Mississippi, allowing commercial traffic to be borne to the Charleston seaport as alternative to downriver in New Orleans, then through the Gulf of Mexico before reaching the Atlantic. Also there was the rail connection between Charleston and Wilmington, the Northeastern Railroad. In this view of the Northeastern Depot, George Barnard shows the ruins of the train station, which had been destroyed in a gunpowder explosion during the Confederate evacuation of mid-February 1865.

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.