When, in the early days of railroad building, the Mobile & Ohio Railroad was being planned, the company proposed to include Columbus as one of its main-line points and asked for a right of way through the town and a cash bonus in consideration of the benefits Columbus would derive from railroad service.  Both requests were refused.  The railroad company then waived the bonus and attempted to obtain a right of way by purchase.  But to no purpose.  The citizens would not sell.  They did not want a railroad.  They were prosperous and healthy, and they contended that a railroad would bring poor people and disease among them, besides killing farm animals and causing runaways.  The company was consequently forced to make a new survey, and when the line was built it passed at a distance of a dozen miles or more from the city.

Gradually dawned the era of speed and impatience.  People who had hitherto been satisfied to make long journeys in horse-drawn vehicles, and had refused the railroad a right of way, now began to complain of the twelve-mile drive to the nearest station, and to suggest that the company build a branch line into the town.  But this time it was the railroad’s turn to say no, and Columbus was informed that if it wished a branch line it could go ahead and build it at its own expense.  This was finally done at a cost of fifty thousand dollars.

With the construction of the branch line, carriages fell into disuse and dilapidation, and many an old barouche, landau, and brett passed into the hands of the negro hackmen who were former slaves of the old families.  Among these ex-slaves the traditions of the first families of Columbus were upheld long after the war, and it thus happened that when, a few years since, a young New Yorker, arriving for a visit in the town, alighted from his train, he was greeted by an ancient negro who, indicating an equally ancient carriage, cried:  “Hack, suh!  Hack, suh!  Ain’t nevah been rid in by none but the Billupses.”

Not every young man from the North would have understood this reference, but by a coincidence it was at the residence of Mrs. Billups that this one had come to visit.

Neither as to hack nor habitation were my companion and I so fortunate as the earlier visitor.  Our conveyance was a Ford, and the driver warned us, as we progressed through shadowy tree-bordered streets, that the Gilmer Hotel was crowded with delegates who had come to attend the State convention of the Order of the Eastern Star.  Nor was his warning without foundation.  The wide old-fashioned lobby of the Gilmer was hung with the colors of the Order and packed with Ladies of the Eastern Star and their ecstatic families; we managed to make our way through the press only to be told by the single worn-out clerk on duty that not a room was to be had.

Unlike the haughty clerk who had dismissed us from the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham, the clerk at the Gilmer was not without the quality of mercy.  Overworked though he was, he began at once to telephone about the town in an effort to secure us rooms.  But if this led us to conclude that our problem was thereby in effect solved, we discovered, after listening to his brief telephonic conversations with a series of unseen ladies, that the conclusion was premature.  Though there were vacant rooms in several private houses, strange stray males were not desired as lodgers.