John Richards, 925 north Second street who was 78 on his birthday last January 18, remembers John Campbell, having worked for him at the age of 10 years when he lived in the county.
“Racky” Richards, as most friends know him, came to Ironton more than three score years ago, and went to work as a laborer when the streetcar line was being built from Orchard Street in West Ironton to Coal Grove. This was in the spring of 1888.
An interested spectator watching the world was John Campbell, as the streetcar track was built up Second Street across the old iron bridge at Storms Creek and went parallel with the N. & W. track from Vesuvius to Etna Street between Belfont Nail Mill and the Eagle Rolling Mill.
Mr. Richards recalls that laborers laying the cross ties and rails in the street were paid 90 cents a day and had to furnish their own tools – pick and shovel. When the track was completed, and the barns for the cars and horses built at the corporation line on Second below Orchard, Mr. Richards was offered a job at the barns.
The first cars operated on July 4, 1888, and that day is a holiday, people rode the cars for pleasure from early morning until late at night, and although he had not been employed to drive cars, before the holiday was over, because of the rush of business, he was pressed into service to drive a car.
Three years later, on July 4, 1891, the line had been completed to Hanging Rock, and again Mr. Richards worked on the holiday and drove a car from Hanging Rock to Coal Grove, the round trip being 14 miles. Between these dates, his duties were to help keep track in repair, and to work at the car barns, where between 50 and 60 horses and mules had to be fed and cared for, and cars had to be kept clean and repaired.
In 1897, when the first two electric cars arrived in town, they were unloaded from railway cars at Front and Etna and taken to the streetcar switch on Second and Etna. Hundreds of citizens gathered to look at the new big electric cars all day, and much to his surprise, Mr. Richards was called late that evening after he had been doing other work all day, to make the first test run on one of the new cars. He had the honor of being the motorman on the first electric car to operate in Ironton, making the test run to Coal Grove and back.
For 22 years he was a motorman on the electric railway, and during that time he never had an accident with a streetcar, which was remarkable considering children lost their arms, men were killed and cars were turned over.
Mr. Richards recalls working for T. T. Johnson, superintendent of the Hoss cars, James J. Walsh, the first superintendent of the electric line, and A. L. Thuma, who was superintendent for a quarter of a century.
On August 28, Mr. and Mrs. John Richards, who has lived in West Ironton since the Hoss streetcar days, will celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary.
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