Harry’s Boxcar

By Andrew Pouncey

Representatives from the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strassburg (rrmuseumpa.org) came to Germantown in 2016 to inspect the boxcar at Oaklawn Gardens.  They found that this was an 1864 +/- boxcar. 

Originally a maintenance car along the railroad on the west end of Collierville, Sonny Foster obtained the boxcar and moved it across the street to store oats for his horses.  When it began to leak, he had his workers put on horizontal siding and an angled roof on top.  Eventually (the mid-60s), Sonny no longer had horses and offered the boxcar to Harry Cloyes.  Beneath the protective wood cladding and pitched roof, the siding is actually vertical, and the roof is barrel-like.  It has lasted a long time because of the protective exterior.  To restore this boxcar, on would need approximately $200,000.  There are two arrangements for the trucks (wheels) that allude to the fact that the Union and the Confederacy had two different widths to their tracks during the Civil War.