Big Boy and Ned Eastman Barnes

​Recently, our area had the opportunity to experience the site of Big Boy. The Union Pacific Railroad Company Locomotive, also known as Union Pacific 4014, is the type built in 1941 by the American Locomotive Company to haul heavy freight trains. Seeing Big Boy as it approached the city of Springs’ train stop was impressive even for me and many others, judging by the crowds it has generated everywhere it has traveled. Given the fact, I’ve had opportunities to travel the world, this Big Boy was something. One can only imagine what a young African-American boy, born of ex-enslaved people in a time of great prejudices and blaring signs of everything not accessible to him, would have thought the first time he saw a massive black steam engine approaching his hometown of Willis, Texas, in 1876. Such was the case of Ned Eastman Barnes born in 1866 in Danville, Montgomery County, Texas with parents probably sharecropping during this post Civil War environment. Willis was a tiny rural area at the time with mud streets, candle lights, kerosene and oil lamps, log cabins, or rough wood structures for housing, horses, and buggies, or walking as the only modes of transportation; railways must have seemed almost mythical. 
 
Due to segregation, African-American children like Ned Eastman Barnes were allowed a fifth-grade education in their local area. If a child wanted to have the opportunity for advanced learning, they would have to leave the area because those opportunities did not exist for these young, poor black children like Ned Eastman Barnes. As a child, working as a houseboy for the T. W. Smith-Owen family, listening as this sometimes lumbering, sometimes roaring, but always moving train coming to and through his hometown and dreaming of seeing the conductors, addressing various challenges on this equipment, and imagining ways to improve those challenges. He would one day file and receive eight patterns for improvements in this system. He would also receive two additional patents in other areas for other mechanical and structural improvements.
 
Having had no mechanical engineering education and yet developing a mechanical engineering aptitude, for many of us today seems impossible, but for those in the Barnes community of the time knew it was a fact. He was well-known and appreciated in his community among his family, church, family, and friends. It must not have been easy because, at the time he received his first patents, there were probably many other applications denied. Looking at the life Ned Eastman Barnes, one gets the impression nothing came easy, even trying to list his occupation on the 1900 census. The enumerator left this area blank, yet the community at the time knew he identified himself as an inventor. His occupation was not listed until the 1910 census when he had received approval for four of his patents. He would go on to get a total of 10 patents, and one of those was shared with Berger Edmond. 
 
Ned Eastman Barnes died in 1952 and is buried in Willis, Montgomery County, Texas, his hometown.
 
C. Stubblefield Walker

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