Steamtown, U.S.A.: The Collection That Started Here and Ended Up in Pennsylvania

Bellows Falls, Vermont, is not where most people would expect to find the origin story of a national historic site, but that is exactly what happened here, along the Connecticut River, where one eccentric millionaire's obsession with steam locomotives launched one of the most unusual preservation campaigns in American history.

F. Nelson Blount was a seafood industry millionaire from New England who had made his fortune in fish sticks and frozen shrimp. He was also a passionate collector of steam locomotives, at a time in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties when the railroads were scrapping their steam fleets as fast as they could, replacing them with diesel. Blount started buying engines before they could be cut apart, acquiring them one by one and hauling them to a property he called Riverside, just across the Connecticut River from Bellows Falls, on the Vermont side.

In nineteen sixty-three, Blount established the Steamtown Foundation to run the growing collection as a museum and excursion railroad. At its peak, Steamtown, U.S.A. ran steam excursions out of North Walpole, New Hampshire, and attracted visitors who had never expected to see working steam locomotives again. Blount died in a plane crash in nineteen sixty-seven, but the foundation carried on.

The problem was Vermont itself. The state's air quality regulations made running steam engines increasingly difficult. Attendance fell, track disputes multiplied, and by the early nineteen eighties the enterprise was struggling. In nineteen eighty-four, the foundation began moving the collection south to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where city officials saw the locomotives as an anchor for urban redevelopment. Congress appropriated eight million dollars in nineteen eighty-six to turn Scranton into a National Historic Site, a decision that drew considerable ridicule from critics who called it a pork project. The collection Blount assembled here is now the Steamtown National Historic Site in Pennsylvania.

What remains in Bellows Falls today is quieter: a town with deep railroad history, a canal that predates the locomotives, and the memory of the engines that once rolled through here on their way somewhere else.