Kenneth Howard Smith - THE GREEN LINE - CHAPTER 004

THE GREEN LINE – CHAPTER 004
By Kenneth Howard Smith

The year was 1867, and America was healing—slowly, painfully—from the Civil War that had nearly split her in two. The railroads were the veins of her recovery, carrying the lifeblood of commerce, people, and hope. And no one understood that better than the Green family.

While young Edward remained in England studying under his father’s watch, his brother Edwin’s mind had turned fragile. The Boston doctors called it “nervous fatigue” or “melancholia,” names they gave to any illness they could not see or cure. His mother, Mrs. Hattie Green, simply called it sadness. She visited him each week at the quiet hospital overlooking the Charles River, bringing him chess pieces and peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. He’d play a few moves, forget what game he was playing, then laugh and start again.

His sister Elizabeth—sharp-eyed and business-minded beyond her years—never failed to visit him on Sundays. She’d bring ledgers and talk about her projects: new houses along the coast, streetcar investments, and telegraph lines stretching west. She did not tell Edwin that she and Trudy had turned $250,000 into a fortune of more than $250 million. The money no longer came from ships or whale oil or coffee plantations—it came from building America itself.

Still, money meant little when it could not reach the heart. Edwin’s smile faded with each passing month, and when he no longer recognized his own reflection in the glass, Mrs. Green decided to stop hoping for a cure and instead gave him what comfort she could: peace and routine. In the quiet wards of Boston, Edwin Green became a legend whispered by the nurses—a kind man with a gentle grin who believed the trains outside his window were his brother’s toys come to life.

Trudy—Dr. Colonel Edwin Truman Green—wrote him faithfully. Postcards from Nebraska, Texas, even Mexico, each signed with a flourish and a promise: “When I come back, we’ll ride the rails together.”

But Trudy had no time to come back. The West was calling, and the President himself had ordered him to tame the scourge of the South—the Boll Weevil—and to inspect the new railroads that were binding the nation together. His assignment: to oversee and protect the Sun Line, a 1,500-mile stretch of iron threading through Kansas, Oklahoma Territory, and Texas.

The Sun Line was no ordinary railroad. It had been purchased for pennies by Mrs. Green after another tycoon defaulted. Its charter, written under the 1850s Railroad Expansion Act, allowed it to build branch lines into any town within sixty miles. That meant the Greens didn’t just own a railroad—they owned opportunity itself.

When Trudy disembarked at Abilene, Kansas, he stepped into the heart of the Chisholm Trail. Cattle crowded every street, the air thick with dust, sweat, and the clang of spurs. Abilene was where cowboys came to turn their herds into gold and then lose it again at the saloon tables.

Colonel Green stood tall in his government coat, his boots polished, his hat low over his brow. Beside him was a small entourage of surveyors, engineers, and former Union soldiers who had traded rifles for shovels. Their task was monumental: extend the Sun Line to connect with the national rail grid and build westward into territory where only wagon ruts and buffalo paths existed.

The first three miles were finished in as many days—rails hammered into red earth, ties soaked in tar to hold against the weather. Each day began before dawn, with the whistle of the steam crane and the rhythmic clang of iron on iron. By nightfall, the men sat by campfires, talking about home and watching the sparks float into a sky so wide it seemed to swallow them whole.

Local farmers, mostly freedmen and settlers, came to watch. They’d lost crops to drought and the creeping Boll Weevil that Doctor George Washington Carver had warned about. Trudy remembered Carver’s words in Nebraska—how the pest would devour cotton and leave families destitute. He shared what he’d learned: that new crops like peanuts and soybeans could save their land. It wasn’t the kind of talk they expected from a government man, especially one with a doctor’s degree and skin light enough to pass unnoticed in Washington. But Trudy wasn’t interested in being noticed. He was interested in helping.

The town of Abilene grew around the Green camp. A telegraph office was built, followed by a general store, a post, and then a small wooden church that doubled as a schoolhouse. The railroad didn’t just move goods—it moved faith, learning, and commerce. It connected the forgotten.

Letters home told Mrs. Green of his progress. She read them at her oak desk beneath the portrait of her late husband. When one envelope arrived heavier than the rest, she found inside a folded document—a map of the Sun Line, traced in Trudy’s hand, with new branches planned toward Amarillo and beyond. She smiled, then pulled a small leather satchel from the cabinet. Inside were bundles of stock certificates, bonds, and deeds—her husband’s and Edwin’s legacy.

When Trudy returned east on official business, she handed the satchel to him.
“Your brother wanted you to have this,” she said softly. “It’s the Sun Line. You’ll make it something worth his name.”

He tried to protest—he was a soldier, not a businessman—but she silenced him with a look that carried both command and love.
“Your father built ships. You’ll build rails. Both lead men forward.”

So began a new chapter of the Green legacy.

Trudy returned West with the papers in his coat pocket and a new resolve in his heart. He expanded the line from Abilene through the Texas Panhandle, linking ranches, mining towns, and trading posts. Each junction brought new settlers, schools, and markets. His “Sun Line” became known as The Green Line, a symbol of renewal in the wake of war.

By 1872, the line stretched through a dozen territories. Cotton was fading, but new crops filled the fields. Ranchers sent cattle east on Green Line trains, farmers shipped grain, and families followed the tracks into the frontier.

And though Trudy often rode alone in the conductor’s car, watching the horizon roll by, he carried with him every person who had shaped his journey—his gentle brother Edwin, his determined mother, and his proud father across the sea. The rails hummed beneath him like a heartbeat, and he believed, perhaps for the first time, that destiny wasn’t a place one reached. It was the line one built getting there.