Andrew Hartford

Andrew Hartford is the Great-Great-Grandfather of Katy Hartford and the first Hartford to get involved in railroading.

Biography
Andrew was born in 1816 in Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a blacksmith, making horseshoes, tools, and other needful objects. He also built boilers for stationary steam engines that pumped water out of coal mines. He worked with his father building these machines and tools. At the age of 13, the family moved to Manchester and also at that age, he and his father attended and witnessed the Rainhill Trials of 1829 and the young scottish lad was fascinated with railways ever since.

In 1831 at the age of 15, young Andrew left home to make his fortune. He moved to Newcastle and tried to make his living as a blacksmith's apprentice, but it wasn't going anywhere. He then decided to move to America, the land of opportunity. He quickly made enough to pay for his fare and boarded the  Allegheny  to his life in America. Coincidently, it so happened that the locomotive  John Bull  was also making it's way towards the United States of America. Once arriving in America (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to be precise, Andrew helped deliver the locomotive to the Camden & Amboy Railroad Company and that's when he was hired by C&A engineer Isaac Dripps to help assemble the locomotive. After the engine was assembled, Andrew became the locomotive's first fireman and worked with the  John Bull  for many years afterwards. Andrew soon made himself enough money to not only substain himself, but to also pay off his father's debts and bring his mother to move in with him after the death of his father in 1841.

In 1845, Andrew met a beautiful Irish woman by the name of Sarah O' Connor who left Dublin, Ireland to escape the great Potato Famine. They hit off and married and their son, Jackson Hartford, was born, later followed by a daughter, Mabel, in 1848. In 1861, Jackson joined the Union Army when the American Civil War started and had a son (a.k.a. Sheldon T.C. Hartford) in 1862. In 1866, the John Bull was retired from service and Andrew moved his family to the Southeastern United States and find work on the Smoky Mountain & Atlantic Railroad Company as an engine driver.

In 1888, Andrew retired from over 50 years of railroad work. In 1905, Sheldon bought the SM&A and renamed it the Knoxville & Asheville Railroad Company. Also in that, it is noted that Andrew also drove the K&A's first locomotive, a Baldwin 2-8-2, which would later be named Smokey, when some passengers were stranded in a forest fire in the mountains. Andrew died in 1906 at the ancient age of 90.