The West Point Foundry Association
Figure 18.—Early drawing of Best Friend of Charleston, built in 1830.
The scene is now shifted to South Carolina and New York. The West Point Foundry Association, situated in New York City, had been the location of a stationary demonstration under steam of the blocked-up Stourbridge Lion on May 28, 1829, shortly after it was unloaded from the ship that brought it from Liverpool. The Association soon thereafter built a locomotive ([figure 18]) for the South-Carolina Canal and Rail-Road Co., which was building a line from Charleston to Hamburg, S. C., just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga. Prior to its adoption of the steam locomotive, the railroad had used horses to draw its cars, and had even experimented with a wind-propelled sail car.
The locomotive, the Best Friend of Charleston, which was to become the first to operate on a regularly scheduled run in this country, was constructed at a cost of $4,000 in the summer of 1830, and arrived at Charleston on October 23 of that year, on the ship Niagara. The same Horatio Allen who had tested the Stourbridge Lion for the Delaware and Hudson had become chief engineer of the South-Carolina Canal and Rail-Road Co. and was one of those responsible for the plans of the Best Friend.
Local machinists at Charleston were hired to reassemble the locomotive and prepare it for its first trial, but when the run was made on November 2, 1830, the wheels were discovered to be unsatisfactory. They were replaced by sturdier ones, and following a subsequent test on December 9, the locomotive was accepted. After several more experimental runs, some with passengers, the official first run, carrying 141 persons, finally took place on Christmas Day 1830.
Notice of the coming event had been published the previous day, so it became the first steam railroad train run scheduled by “timetable” to be made in the Western Hemisphere. All previous locomotive operations on this side of the Atlantic had been purely experimental—for test or demonstration purposes. At the time of this run the tracks of the railroad extended only about 6 miles out of Charleston, but by October 3, 1833, the full 136 miles to Hamburg had been completed. The South-Carolina Canal and Rail-Road was then the longest continuous railroad in the world (see [figure 19]).
A description of the Best Friend by David Matthew, who in 1830 had been foreman of the West Point Foundry Association, is contained in a letter he wrote in 1859 to the historian William H. Brown. Later quoted by Brown in his “History of the First Locomotives in America,” the letter says in part:
The Best Friend was a four-wheel engine, all four wheels drivers. Two inclined cylinders at an angle, working down on a double crank, inside of the frame, with the wheels outside of the frame, each wheel connecting together outside, with outside rods. The wheels were iron hub, wooden spokes and felloes, with iron tire, and iron web and pins in the wheels to connect the outside rods to.
The boiler was a vertical one, in form of an old-fashioned porter-bottle, the furnace at the bottom surrounded with water, and all filled inside full of what we called teats, running out from the sides and top, with alternate stays to support the crown of the furnace; the smoke and gas passing out through the sides at several points, into an outside jacket; which had the chimney on it. The boiler sat on a frame upon four wheels, with the connecting-rods running by it to come into the crankshaft. The cylinders were about six inches in the bore, and sixteen inches’ stroke. Wheels about four and a half feet in diameter. The whole machine weighed about four and a half tons.
