Cass Ave. railroad abutment will be a concrete canvas for high school art teacher and her students as they’ll put paint to plaster to pay tribute to Charles Melville Hays Mural in the making
T here is an old railroad abutment alongside Cass Avenue near Woonsocket High School that most people probably drive by without a question or thought about its purpose. It is just a massive block of concrete and stone running about 60 feet long and 14 feet high on the northern side overlooking Cass Park, and features a flat side facing the road that occasionally gets a coat of gray paint to cover graffiti that crops up from time to time.
High School art teacher Diane Mayers and the 16 students of her gifted art class are working to end the railroad fixture’s anonymity with a special mural project planned out last fall and now in production on Cass.
The abutment is after all, a historic artifact of the never completed Southern New England Railway that had been envisioned by Canadian railroad magnate, Charles Melville Hays. As president of Canada’s transcontinental Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, Hays, a U.S. transplant and native of Illinois, wanted an East Coast seaport connection that did not freeze up in winter like those in northeastern Canada.
The Southern New England Railway spur of the Grand Trunk was to be built across Massachusetts and down in to Providence through Woonsocket as part of Hays’ strategy to compete with the rival New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad which also had routes through the area.
The story doesn’t end there, however.
While working on financing for his railroad company, Hays made a trip to England to meet with investors and then made arrangements his return to the United States in April of 1912.
The ship Hays booked for his wife, Clara, one of his four daughters, and the family maid’s transatlantic crossing was the RMS Titanic, the fated ocean liner that struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage to New York and sank on April 15, 1912.
Hays was among the 1,500 passengers lost in the disaster while his family and maid returned to New York with other rescued survivors.
Mayers and her students were approached by the city to come up with an artwork to decorate the old Grand Trunk railroad abutment and the teacher said that the class settled on telling the story of Hays’ ill-fated journey and his railroad ties as the best use of their vacant canvas.
“So we are painting a mural and it is going to tell the story of what happened to Charles Hays,” Mayers said. “That is what this wall is all about,” she said.
To start the project, Mayers had to first secure permission from the property owner of the land on which the abutment is local. The concrete structure today serves as a retaining wall of sorts for a residential property uphill from Cass.
The students then drew out their ideas for the mural and combined the concepts of Hays’ railroad endeavors and his voyage on the Titanic into a mural layout to be painted on the abutment.
While the high school was on April vacation, Mayers, her husband Kip, a teacher assistant at Globe Park Elementary, and Madison Chamberland and her father Jonathan, a concrete restoration contractor, put in some prep work at the abutment, power washing the wall and smoothing out rough sections with a concrete covering.
The next step will be to actually begin the painting with a long lasting concrete paint, Mayers said.
“Madison is going to paint Charles Hays’ portrait on the wall and there is also going to be train at one end and the Titanic that all come together to tell the story, she said.
Madison said she and her classmates learned a lot about Hays and the Titanic while researching the mural project.
“He basically picked the wrong ship because he died on the Titanic,” she said. The mural should be interesting when it is finished because Mayers incorporated all of her students’ ideas in the final plan, she added.
“When she had us research Hays, there was a lot of information on him that we found,” she said.
Mayers said she hopes to get the entire mural finished by the end of school but will finish up any remaining components in fall if necessary.
The city was going to cover the cost of the mural initially, but Mayers said the school department found enough available funding, about $200, to pay for the materials her students would need to paint the project. The Chamberlains also donated their time in doing the prep work on the wall.
Although he is known locally for losing his life in the Titanic’s sinking, Millville historian Margaret Carroll noted that Hays should also be remembered for his many accomplishments, when contacted about the students’ mural project.
“Some people call it the Titanic Railroad because Hays died in the sinking and they think the money went down with the ship,” Carroll said.
In fact, work on the Southern New England Railway continued after Hays’ death with nearly three-quarters of the route, including the stretch through Woonsocket, Blackstone and Millville, being completed before World War I began and likely sealed its fate.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad also continued without Hays for a time but was eventually taken over by the Canadian National Railroad system.
In addition to Woonsocket’s abutment on Cass, remnants of the Southern New England Railway can also be found next to homes on George Street in the city, in Blackstone and along the new Blackstone River Bikeway in that makes use of abandoned railroad beds in Millville. The route is also being preserved as a part of a trail system in western Massachusetts including sections in Southbridge and Sturbridge.
Carroll said Hays’ plans for his local route required that the trains travel at speeds of 40 miles an hour and face no “grade level” crossings. That set up the scenario for the Triad train bridge over the Blackstone River in Millville where Hays’ trains would have crossed over two of his competitors’ lines at the very top of a trestle bridge structure. The supporting structures were built, but no tracks were ever laid for the Southern New England Railway.
Carroll said she is looking forward to seeing how Woonsocket High School’s students remember Hays with their artwork on his old abutment.
“Oh I think it is a wonderful idea,” she said. “The Grand Trunk was very much a part of Millville’s history,” Carroll added.