My grandfather, James H. Lemly, Sr. wrote a neat book back in 1953: The Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio: The railroad that had to expand or expire. A dynamic history of the Tigrett Road.
Fifty-one years later, my father has published it online, to celebrate his father-in-law Jim's 90th birthday! My father has spent a good six months preparing this document for online publishing, a labor of love if I ever heard of it.
We hope this work will be useful to those interested in the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio railroads, as well as useful to researchers of other subjects that might hit this data via their interest in Southern history, economics, transportation or other subjects.
Those interested in learning more about the GM&O should contact the historical society and say we sent ya!
I talked to my grandfather for a while to convince him to use a Creative Commons license on the work. Since he is 90, and not expecting remuneration from this old work, putting it into the public domain in some fashion is very appropriate. Now, if someone wants to make a song-and-dance number about the GM&O, they can use his writing! :)
I'm particularly excited that now, when researchers use search engines for information about anything that he covered, they might find pieces of his research and be able to source it, where they'd never have considered picking his book off the shelf. I can easily imagine a search on "Coverdale and Colpitts " taking someone to Chapter 11, or some such obscurata. I think old, specialized, small-printing books like this are the best types of books to put the text of online, because they contain so many nuggets of obscure information.
Tomorrow we'll have a small party at my house for his birthday. I'll post pictures when I can.
