Tar Heel Streetcars
Ranged Far and Wide
Some of Ihe High Point-made ears
are still in operation, the last of their
kind in the nation.
By MICHAEL J. DUNN III
Though furniture, hosier)', school-
buses and electronic components today
spread the reputation of industrial High
Point around the world, these items arc
just following another, now almost for¬
gotten product that earlier carried that
city's fame to other cities from Canada
to the Caribbean.
The product? Trolley cars! Hun¬
dreds of them were built over a quarter
century period by two successive High
Point firms, the Southern Car Com¬
pany and the Pcrlcy A. Thomas Car
Works. Moreover, the Thomas firm re¬
mains active today, to which hundreds
of thousands of school kids can attest,
as a major builder of schoolbus bodies.
It was entrepreneurs and craftsmen
from Massachusetts who first brought
this industry down into North Carolina,
when they set up the Southern Car Co.
This took place shortly after the turn
of the century, and the new firm's an¬
nouncements boasted Southern Car’s
location in the "finest timber section of
the South." and claimed that the com¬
pany had secured "the services of
skilled carbuildcrs from the North."
F.lcgant Parlor Car
Southern Car made its debut during
the heyday of gracious trolley travel,
and the company’s first advertising fea¬
tured a masterpiece of carbuilding art,
an elegant trolley parlor car named
"Merrymccting." Mcrrymccting's rid¬
ers could find shelter in its closed cabin
or laze in bucolic splendor in the wicker
lounge chairs on its open, wrought-
iron-railcd platforms.
Most of Southern’s cars presented a
more workaday character than the idyl-
Ne- Orleans Public Service Company -os
о
lorge customer of the High Point firm; ond now, on this
line, is operating the only remoining fleet of troditionol-dcsign streetcars in the United Stoles;
every one is a Thomos cor. and every one is over forty yeors old.
THE STATE. AUOUST 1. 1969
On New Orlcons' fomous Conol Street. Cor 918,
built by the Pcrley A. Thomos Cor Works, of
High Point, -os photogrophed by Mile Dunn |ust
о
month before the line -os converted, in 1964.
Cor 918 -os returned to High Point oftcr its re¬
tirement.
lie Merrymccting. These took the form
of city streetcars; heavier and speedier
and more luxurious intcrurban cars for
intercity travel; and occasional special
cars, including at least one electric
freight locomotive.
Records of Southern's production
can only be pieced together now. fifty
years after the company left business,
but we do know that the company fol¬
lowed the industry trend away from
building all-wood cars and built its first
orders of all-steel cars by 1914. Among
these cars were some interesting
double-deck all-steel cars for Washing¬
ton. D. C. and a whole fleet of all-steel
cars for New Orleans in 1914. Other
buyers ranged from huge metropolitan
systems as far apart as New York City
and San Juan. Puerto Rico, to lines
smaller and closer to home. The little,
semi-rural Salisbury & Spencer Rail¬
way. for example, was using Southern
cars as early as 1906.
Among customers for its intcrurban
cars was the famous Washington & Old
Dominion line in Virginia, just a few
years before the car company's demise.
Its one known trolley locomotive (and
probably its only one) was built in
1914 for a High Point power com¬
pany's freight line and outlived the
Southern Car Co. by 27 years!
Thomas Succeeds Southern
Southern Car fell upon hard times,
closed around 1917, and was even¬
tually declared bankrupt in March.
1918. Not all of Southern's talented
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