When Iron Met Rubber
- Craig Rhinehart
- Apr 25
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Project Preview Backgrounder
Every summer, the ritual returned. Quietly at first, then with the inevitability of a public event. Henry Ford, whose assembly lines had pushed the automobile into everyday life. Thomas Edison, the elder symbol of American invention. Harvey Firestone, whose tires made long-distance motoring practical. And John Burroughs, the naturalist who insisted the whole point was to get away from engines and egos and return to woods and water. Together they were known, by themselves and by the press, as the Vagabonds. These famous men traveling as if they were simply campers, even when the country treated their movement like news.
As plans take shape for another annual excursion in the early 1920s, they choose a destination that fits their ritual. They want real mountain cooler air, dramatic terrain, a place that still feels earned at the end of a rough road. Their talk turns to Garrett County, Maryland, and then to Oakland. Oakland is the county seat and rising local town, and to the falls country north of it, where they can camp near Muddy Creek Falls and disappear into forest shade for a few days.
But Garrett County didn’t become a destination by accident. Its modern identity had been shaped by the railroad age—the result of investment, man-made access, and the deliberate act of putting a place “on the map.” John Work Garrett looms over that story even after his death. His name tied to the county, his era tied to the B&O’s expansion across the mountains, and his family tied to the landscape itself through the donation of land that later becomes part of the conservation story around the falls and forests. In the early 1920s, it is not yet “Swallow Falls State Park” as visitors know it today. The CCC-built roads and rustic structures come later. For now, it is simply "the falls." A place reached by rougher roads, paper maps, and local directions.
At the same time, another party is preparing for a very different kind of summer movement. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is approaching its centennial with pride, but it can feel the new age arriving. The automobile is no longer a novelty; it’s becoming a habit, a competitor, a shift in what travelers expect. Under Daniel Willard, practical, disciplined, and widely admired, the B&O is still regaining its footing after wartime control. But it has big plans and hard decisions to make.
A small B&O leadership team has scheduled an executive offsite meeting at the Deer Park Hotel, the railroad’s mountain resort property and a familiar place for its leaders to gather. Their agenda is not ceremonial. It’s strategic. It includes discussions about how to strengthen premier passenger service, how to treat the passenger experience as something designed and improved, not merely tolerated, and how to prepare for a coming centennial that must project modern relevance, not nostalgia. The traveling party includes Willard himself and a few key executives, notably E. Francis Baldwin, whose stations and hotel work shape the B&O’s public face, and Olive Dennis, whose presence signals that comfort and service are becoming an engineered advantage.
Then the story accelerates from two different directions.
The B&O executives are returning east from Chicago, moving the way railroad men move. By timetable, by division points, by a scheduled stop at Oakland before continuing on to Deer Park. The Vagabonds’ cars are loaded with touring gear, tents, supplies, the quiet machinery of travel by choice. Their route points toward Garrett County’s woods and water, with Oakland as the logical last stop before setting up camp. Railroad business and automobile leisure - two systems, two speeds - are converging on the same gateway town for completely different reasons. In an age before GPS or instant communication, “getting there” rests on older instruments: telegraph wires and timetables for the train, folded Rand McNally maps and spoken directions for the road.
And now comes the “what if” moment, before anyone arrives in Oakland.
What if, just for a moment, the railroad age and the automobile age arrive within the same hour, close enough to catch sight of the alluring smoke of a B&O Pacific class P-5 locomotive at the Oakland station. Close enough to pause, close enough to recognize one another? What would happen? What could happen?
Oakland is just ahead.
And neither party yet knows the other is coming.
Coming in early 2027 will be a museum quality painting and prints to be made available online and through museum gift shops. Also planned is a short story, presentations, live events, interpretive digital art, educational and companion materials. Those details will be made available as we get closer to 2027.
