The Martinsburg Roundhouse and the Strike That Changed America

The brick roundhouse complex on the south end of Martinsburg, West Virginia, is easy to miss from the highway, but it holds two significant moments in American history, one military and one economic, separated by fifteen years.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached Martinsburg in eighteen forty-two, and by eighteen forty-nine it had built a roundhouse and repair shops that made this city the central maintenance hub between Baltimore and Cumberland. The complex was first struck in eighteen sixty-one, when Colonel Thomas Jackson, soon to be known as Stonewall, captured more than a dozen locomotives here and, in a logistical masterstroke that reveals something about the Confederacy's industrial desperation, had them taken apart and hauled south by teams of horses for Confederate use. The complex itself was burned to the ground the following year, in eighteen sixty-two, when Jackson's forces returned during their withdrawal from Maryland. A new shop complex, designed by engineer Albert Fink, was completed in eighteen sixty-six. The domed locomotive roundhouse it produced was considered a masterpiece of nineteenth-century industrial architecture.

Then came mid-July of eighteen seventy-seven. The Baltimore and Ohio had cut worker wages for the third time in a year. Firemen at the Martinsburg depot refused to uncouple the locomotives. They declared that no trains would leave Martinsburg until the cut was rescinded. West Virginia's governor called out the state militia. Many of the militiamen were themselves railroad workers and refused to fire on the strikers. The governor asked President Hayes for federal troops.

Within days, the strike had spread to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and beyond. More than a hundred thousand workers walked off the job across the country in what became known as the Great Railroad Strike of eighteen seventy-seven, the first nationwide labor strike in United States history. Troops eventually broke the strike. The wage cuts held. But the strike fundamentally changed how American business and government thought about organized labor, and it planted seeds that would bear fruit in the union movement of the following century.

The Martinsburg roundhouse is now a protected historic landmark and an interpretive museum.