William Dudley Chipley facts for kids
William Dudley Chipley (June 6, 1840 – December 1, 1897) was an American railroad executive and politician who was instrumental in the building of the Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad and was a tireless promoter of Pensacola, his adopted city, where he was elected to one term as mayor, and later to a term as Florida state senator.
Following the American Civil War, in 1868 Chipley was one of twenty men arrested in his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, in 1868 on suspicion of participation in the murder of Radical Republican judge George W. Ashburn by the Ku Klux Klan. Political maneuvers resulted in the dropping of all charges.
In 1877, Chipley helped Texas Rangers and Florida law officers subdue and arrest outlaw John Wesley Hardin aboard a train in Pensacola. Hardin was subsequently returned to Texas, convicted on outstanding murder charges, and imprisoned.
Early life
Chipley was born in Columbus, Georgia, the son of Dr. William Stout Chipley and Elizabeth Fannin Chipley. Chipley's grandfather, the Rev. Stephen Chipley, was one of the founding citizens of Lexington, Kentucky. Dr. Chipley was renowned for his work relating to brain diseases and held two jobs: a professor of medicine at Transylvania University and the warden of the Eastern Asylum for the Insane in Lexington.
Chipley moved with his parents back to Lexington when he was four years old, and was raised for all of his formative years in Kentucky. He graduated from the Kentucky Military Institute and Transylvania University.
Military service
After graduation from Transylvania, he enlisted in the 9th Kentucky Infantry, fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He was elevated to the position of lieutenant colonel and was wounded at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga before being taken prisoner at the Battle of Peachtree Creek near Atlanta. As a prisoner of war, Chipley was transported to Johnson's Island on Lake Erie in Ohio, and was interned there until the war was over. In mid-1865, he settled in Columbus and married Ann Elizabeth Billups, the daughter of a prominent planter in Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus.
Railroad executive
Chipley entered the railroad industry shortly after the Ashburn trial. He worked for the Columbus and Rome Railroad, and later for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from 1873 to 1876. It was at this time that he moved to Pensacola, Florida, where he was made general manager of the Pensacola Railroad, a 45-mile line linking Pensacola with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, its parent company from 1880 onward. Chipley was also instrumental in the promoting and building of L&N subsidiary Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad in 1881-1883, linking Pensacola and the Florida Panhandle with the eastern part of the state for the first time. Chipley was made vice-president of the P&A.
Chipley's success in getting a railroad built through the Panhandle led the residents of Orange, Florida, to rename their town Chipley in 1882. In the same year, the town of Chipley, Georgia, near Columbus, was named for him, after he got the tracks of the Columbus and Rome Railroad extended to that community; the town's name was changed to Pine Mountain in 1958.
Politics and death
Chipley created the Democratic Executive Committee in Muscogee County, Georgia in the late 1860s, and was its first director. He later served as director of the Florida Democratic Executive Committee.
Chipley served one term as the mayor of Pensacola (1887–1888). He also served in the Florida State Senate from 1895 to 1897, and lost his bid for United States Senator in 1896 by one vote.
While on a trip to Washington, D.C., Chipley died on December 1, 1897. He was in the middle of a trip to lobby lawmakers to base more industrial endeavors in Florida. He was buried in Columbus, while the townspeople of Pensacola erected an obelisk in the Plaza Ferdinand VII in his honor.
