The George Earl Church Collection
In 1912, the John Hay Library acquired the private collection of Col. George Earl Church (1835–1910), a noted engineer, explorer, soldier and investor from New Bedford, Massachusetts. Church was one of the lead engineers behind the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad project, a plan to provide the government of Bolivia, a landlocked country and major producer of rubber, a means of communication to the Atlantic through the Amazon River and its tributaries.

See BruKnow records for Brazilian materials from the George Earl Church Collection.

Col. George Earl Church and the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad project
The Madeira-Mamoré Railway was built between 1872 and 1912 in three phases. In 1870, Col. Church won from the Brazilian and Bolivian governments the right to lay rail tracks that would allow traders to avoid the falls of the Madeira River, one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon. In a visit to Rio de Janeiro, he secured not only the railroad concession, but also mining privileges and a land grant covering alternate sections along the railway. Church then founded the Madeira-Mamoré Railway Company in New York and raised money in London to begin construction. He directed the first and second expeditions to the Amazon during the 1870s, and confronted major obstacles to bring the project to fruition. The Amazonian heat, coupled with the difficulty of the terrain and the loss of life from malaria and other tropical diseases led many of Church’s partners to breach their contracts.

Nevertheless, on July 4, 1878, celebrating the American Independence Day, the first branch of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway was inaugurated with the baptism of a Baldwin Locomotive with the name “Colonel Church” – the first locomotive to ever run in the Amazon. Work continued for some years, but builders gave up the project entirely in 1897. The third phase of construction commenced in 1907 under the supervision of another American entrepreneur, Percival Farquhar. In five years, workers erected 366 kilometers of tracks cutting across the rainforest. Farquhar took the railroad to completion in 1912, finally linking the Brazilian cities of Porto Velho and Guajará-Mirim through what is today the state of Rondônia.

Building the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad proved so dangerous that it became known to posterity as the Devil’s Railway. Although precise statistics are absent, the numbers of workers’ lives claimed during construction range from 3,500 to 7,000. The railway’s heyday, however, was over almost before it had begun. Use of the Madeira-Mamoré quickly declined in the face of untenable maintenance costs and Malaisian dominance of the international rubber market. Recent years have seen some moves towards restoring parts of the railroad and a museum is currently open to visitants in the city of Porto Velho. In 2005, Brazil’s National Institute of Artistic and Historical Heritage (IPHAN) declared the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad a national heritage site.