page_title: Southern Railway's Spencer Shops
section_title: Henderson acquisitions
hierarchical_section_title: Southern Railway's Spencer Shops / History / Henderson acquisitions
caption_attribution_description: English: Train repair shop, North Carolina Transportation Museum, Spencer, North Carolina.
context_page_description: Southern Railway's Spencer Shops were a major steam locomotive repair facility between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. in Spencer, North Carolina. The service facility was once Southern Railway's largest steam locomotive repair center. The period of greatest prosperity and productivity for the facility was in the first half of the twentieth century. These type of repair service facilities for the railroads were called "back shops". They were located in every division of a railroad system and centralized for the most extensive kinds of repairs.
  The Spencer Shops "back shops" were named in honor of the first president of the Southern Railway, Samuel Spencer, as was the name of the new town developed for these facilities. The Spencer Shops were located near Salisbury, North Carolina. The conversion from steam locomotives to diesel locomotives caused the demise of the Spencer Shops. They were phased out from the 1950s to the 1970s. The former Spencer Shops complex is now part of the North Carolina Transportation Museum.
context_section_description: The development of the facilities for Spencer Shops started with John Steele Henderson. He was a Confederate veteran, a former state senator and Rowan county's largest landholder at the time. History records that Henderson entered into secret negotiations with Southern Railway officials for land acquisitions for the proposed major facility to act as a type of front dummy entity to prevent price speculating. He was to buy the land secretly for the new shop complex and sell it back to the railroad at or near the low price he paid.  This decision was taken because in 1896 it was already publicly known that the Southern Railway was looking for potential land for this facility, though at the time the Charlotte area was seen as the logical choice for the complex.
  In January 1896, Henderson began buying large tracts of land two miles (3 km) north of Salisbury directly on Southern Railroad's main line. He then sold most of it back to the Southern Railway for slightly more than he paid for it. Henderson further profited from the arrangement by selling land that he owned in the area to people that worked for the shops. At the turn of the century he also sold some land from the deal that he had kept for himself back to Southern Railway for a large profit. The workmen turned the first shovels of 75,000 cubic yards (57,000 m³) of dirt for construction on March 23, 1896. Spencer officially opened the shops on August 19, 1896.
caption: Spencer train repair shop
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