George Pullman made his first fortune in Gilpin County

Before founding the famous railroad sleeping car company

Linda Jones

04/17/2008 - Did he or didn’t he invent the famed railroad sleeping car that earned millions for him? Stories differ but one fact all his biographers agree on is that the money which sustained him while he improved his convertible sleeping car came from Gilpin County, Colorado Territory.

  His first fortune came from a partnership with James Lyon from 1860 – 1863; the two men began and operated several gold-mining camp businesses in and around Central City. They bought gold dust and ran a small banking business. They operated a concentrator near Black Hawk, opened and developed Claim #6 of the rich Gregory Lode (still visible along Gregory Street in Black Hawk), operated a quartz mill in Russell Gulch and a general store in Central City. These busy entrepreneurs also operated a sawmill operation, a hay transporting business and other freighting businesses. Pullman was one of the major investors in the Chase gold-mining operation in Willis Gulch and, in partnership with Lyon again, owned the Big Gold Dirt Mine in north Gilpin County.

  In January, 1863, he closed the last of his business interests in the Colorado gold fields and returned to Chicago to follow his dream of perfecting the sleeping coach that would bear his name.  The $20,000 he took when he left the Territory of Colorado was a fortune in those days and it supported him while he tinkered. Another legacy from Colorado Territory was Harriet Sanger, whom he met while he was here and married in 1867 after forming his famous Palace Pullman Car Company.

  George Mortimer Pullman was born on March 3, 1831, in Brocton, New York. When his father died, George continued work on his father’s contract for clearing buildings from the proposed Erie Canal route. After completion of this project he moved to Chicago, where he won a contract in 1857 to raise buildings out of a mud-choked business district to above flood level.

  In Chicago in the late 1850s he and his partner Benjamin Field had begun envisioning a convertible railroad car with seats for daytime travel and berths for night-time travel. Bunks or tiered berths were not new; they had been used for centuries on sailing ships. Pennsylvania had “sleeping cars” on the railroads in 1836, but they were separate cars with built-in bunks, usable only for sleeping at night and wasted during the day, making them expensive for the railroad to haul and not very popular.

  Pullman and Field rebuilt Cars #9 and #19, which debuted on August 15, 1859, on the St. Louis, Chicago & Alton Railroad. The revolutionary improvements, and appeal for the railroads, were that the seat backs could be folded down for a lower berth and the upper berth descended by pulleys from the ceiling. With these movable berths, the same car could be used for both sleeping and seating. In only two weeks, numbers 9 and 19 became an official part of the Chicago to Bloomington route.

  But the Civil War was brewing and railroads would be needed to move troops; luxury sleeping accommodations were a low priority, so Pullman came to Gilpin County’s gold fields to make a living. After he returned to Chicago, he spent every waking moment developing his pioneer car. The experts said it was too wide and too high to ever be used, but history gave the entrepreneur a once-in-a-lifetime chance to promote his comfortable invention. President Lincoln was assassinated and his family was traveling by train from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, where he would be buried. Pullman rushed his pioneer car to completion in time for the Lincoln family to travel in it from Chicago to Springfield. The resulting publicity and exposure launched it successfully. For 30 years he produced his patented railroad cars by the thousands and also designed dining cars and lounge cars at his plant in Pullman, Illinois (later absorbed by Chicago).

  Colorado Magazine, v. 1, #  6, published in 1924, carries an interview with an old-timer, Thomas Cornforth. Cornforth said that Pullman’s Central City partner, Andrew Westlake, was “the inventor of the sleeping car berth. He [Westlake] built the original model in Central City. Pullman took this…….invention to Chicago and sold an interest for enough to complete patents and organize a company.” The oldtimer’s memory must have slipped a bit, however; the first cars Pullman sold with his sleeping system were traveling the rails before he headed “out West”.

  Another article credits another inventor for the railroad sleeping cars, but Pullman undoubtedly was the inventor of the fabulously successful “Palace” sleeping car, named after him. It is equally true that the $20,000 he used to build the car came from his 1860-63 sojourn in the gold boom towns of Gilpin County.

  There’s a contemporary twist to Pullman’s story. For a time, he lived in a log cabin near where the intersection of the Old Golden Road and the Mount Vernon Road would later be. His log home eventually served as a stage stop and later an outbuilding on the Mott Johnson Ranch. The log building was reborn as a coffee shop, then a tavern, next a gas station and finally a grocery store. When it was torn down in 1965, the logs ended up in Gilpin County, appropriately enough. The Gilpin County Historical Society decided the residence should be reconstructed near where it was originally located and took the logs to the Clear Creek Ranch Park. Their final fate is unknown at press time.