Steamtown was a steam locomotive museum that ran excursions out of North Walpole, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont, from the 1960s to 1983. The museum was founded by millionaire seafood industrialist F. Nelson Blount. The non-profit Steamtown Foundation took over operations following his death in 1967. Some pieces of the collection were relocated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1980s and the rest were auctioned off. In 1986, the United States House of Representatives voted to approve USD 8 million to study the collection and to begin the process of making it a National Historic Site.
About Steamtown, U.S.A. in brief
Steamtown was a steam locomotive museum that ran excursions out of North Walpole, New Hampshire, and Bellows Falls, Vermont, from the 1960s to 1983. The museum was founded by millionaire seafood industrialist F. Nelson Blount. The non-profit Steamtown Foundation took over operations following his death in 1967. Some pieces of the collection were relocated to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the mid-1980s and the rest were auctioned off. In 1986, the United States House of Representatives voted to approve USD 8 million to study the collection and to begin the process of making it a National Historic Site. By 1995, Steamtown had been acquired and developed by the NPS with a USD 66 million allocation. Several more pieces have been removed from the collection as a result of the government acquisition. Part of the Blount collection is still on display at the Steamtown National historic site in Scrant on. Blount was the heir to the largest seafood processor in the U.S. and wrote a book on steam power when he was just seventeen years old. He also owned several corporations and controlled the tracks that lay between Walpole and Chester Mountain, which Steamtown used for its excursions. When Blount died in 1967, most of his collection was controlled by the steamtown Foundation and had been relocated to Bellows falls. The National Park Service conducted historical research on the equipment that remained in the Foundation’s possession.
The scope was published in 1991 under the title Steamtown Special History Study. In the early 1960s, Blount came close to entering into an agreement with the state of New Hampshire in which he would donate 20 locomotives to a museum which was to be located in Keene. However, the plan, which was originally approved by New Hampshire governor Wesley Powell, in 1962, was later rejected by the new governor, John W. King. In addition to Edaville Railroad and Steamtown,. Blount also operated excursions at Pleasure Island in Wakefield, Massachusetts and Freedomland U. S. A. in New York City. The Monadnock, Steam Town & Northern Railroad, as the enterprise was then called, ran excursion between Keene and Westmoreland, New. Hampshire. The first of Blount’s business was to acquire the first of the Rutland Railroad for the first time for the excursions to take place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The company was later bought by the Campbell Soup Company, which had also served as National Chairman of Radio Free Europe, and Fred Richardson, then vice president of BlOUNT Seafood, was among the directors of the first business. The last excursion was run in the early 1980s on the property that was once owned by the Rutledge Railroad, and it was once used for the Green Mountain Railroad, which once owned the tracks to Chester Mountain. The most recent excursion took place in August 2013 on the site of the former Rutland railroad.
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