Charles Ellis (28 March 1817–21 July 1900), president of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company, was born in Richmond and was the son of Margaret Keeling Nimmo Ellis and Charles Ellis, a prominent merchant and business partner of John Allan, foster father of Edgar Allan Poe. His uncle Powhatan Ellis served as a United States senator from Mississippi, and his sisters' marriages tied him into an influential network that included his brothers-in-law Richard Ivanhoe Cocke, a member of the Convention of 1850–1851; George Wythe Munford, longtime clerk of the House of Delegates and secretary of the commonwealth; and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1820–1890), United States consul in Liverpool and Confederate diplomatic agent to Canada.
After attending the University of Virginia from 1834 to 1836, Ellis went to work for his father. Following his father's death in November 1840, Ellis operated the family mercantile business, eventually known as the firm of Thomas & Charles Ellis, with his elder brother, Thomas Harding Ellis, who later became president of the James River and Kanawha Company. Their father left a substantial estate, which included stock in the James River and Kanawha Company, the Manchester Cotton and Wool Manufacturing Company, and the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company.
Before his father died, Charles Ellis had already begun attending stockholders' meetings of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company. By 28 May 1844, the Virginia Board of Public Works had appointed him as a director on behalf of the state, which held capital stock in the company. At successive stockholders' meetings from 1856 to 1860 Ellis was elected a director on behalf of the private stockholders. During this period the Richmond and Petersburg operated the Clover Hill Railroad, which transported coal from the mines of southwestern Chesterfield County and was an important revenue source before the Civil War.
On 28 May 1861 Ellis was unanimously elected president of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company. After Virginia joined the Confederacy, the Richmond and Petersburg became part of the vital rail transportation link with the eastern Carolinas. Building connections between the many railroads terminating in Petersburg and Richmond became a high priority, and on 1 February 1862 the General Assembly authorized the Richmond and Petersburg, the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad Company, and the Petersburg Railroad Company to connect their lines.
Company profits increased between 1861 and 1864; revenues for fiscal year 1863 stood at $545,000, while expenditures totaled $250,000, including $48,000 for three captured engines purchased from the Confederate government, four freight cars, and other supplies. Ellis and other railroad officials had to deal with such war-related issues as repairing and replacing war-torn rail lines, tightening of Confederate draft exemptions for railroad personnel, dissuading the military from impressing African American workers for labor details, and fending off government efforts to assume control of the railroads. In 1864 the Richmond and Petersburg held $227,000 in Confederate bonds, about 15 percent of its nearly $1.5 million in assets. Ellis personally owned a large number of Confederate bonds, and in January 1865 he wrote his nephew suggesting that the government should proclaim a limited emancipation of enslaved people in order to secure Southern independence.
Retreating Confederate forces set fire to the Richmond and Petersburg's bridge across the James River during the evacuation of Richmond on 2 April 1865. Despite badly worn track, small engines, dilapidated railroad cars, and only forty remaining coal cars, the company soon resumed operations with two trains running daily between Manchester and Petersburg. As a former Confederate with assets worth more than $20,000, Ellis was required to apply for a presidential pardon, which he received on 26 September 1865. He won reelection on 15 December 1865 as a director of the Manchester Cotton and Wool Manufacturing Company, which had been a large supplier to the Confederacy.
The 2,862-foot-long Richmond and Petersburg Railroad bridge spanning the James River reopened on 26 May 1866 at a construction cost of $118,245. Ellis reported that despite the imperfect condition of connecting railroads, a cholera epidemic in Richmond, and less coal being transported on the Clover Hill Railroad, the company had earned a total income greater than any year before the war. He anticipated future improved earnings because northern markets had reopened for gas-producing coal from the Clover Hill mines.
On 3 March 1866 the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac, and the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Connection Company received its charter. Once built, the connection through Richmond between the two railroads opened for service in April 1867. Despite such improvements and reduced operating costs, Ellis reported substantially reduced revenues in November 1867 related to general business stagnation, crop failures, and reduced coal transportation. To encourage settlement along the Richmond and Petersburg and Clover Hill Railroads, in March 1870 the company offered half-fares to those who bought farms within two miles of the route and provided free transportation for immigrants and their families.
Ellis lost reelection as president of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad at a contentious stockholders' meeting held on 29 November 1870. Disaffected Petersburg stockholders who wanted a reduction in the number of locomotives, employee levels, and fares for trains operating between Richmond and Petersburg brought about his defeat. The board elected Ellis as a director and granted him a full year's salary but did not reappoint him in 1872.
Ellis maintained his ties to the railroad industry, however. In November 1875 he attended a convention in Saint Louis promoting a southern transcontinental railroad. Three years later the governor appointed him a delegate to the Convention for the Promotion of American Commerce. Ellis held a substantial amount of RF&P stock, actively participated in annual meetings, and sat on the committee that annually examined the company's road, bridges, and depots from the 1870s through 1895, when poor health forced his withdrawal from business affairs. He never married. Charles Ellis died at his Richmond home on 21 July 1900 and was buried in Shockoe Cemetery. His substantial estate included almost $165,000 in stockholdings.
Sources Consulted:
Family history in Ellis to Mary Davies Hunter Hall, 15 Mar. 1873, Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC), Richmond, and Thomas Harding Ellis (brother), A Memorandum of the Ellis Family (ca. 1906), with birth date and incorrect death date of 19 July 1900 on 41; Ellis's University of Virginia diary, Accession 28599, Library of Virginia (LVA), printed in Ronald B. Head, ed., "The Student Diary of Charles Ellis Jr., March 10–June 25, 1835," Magazine of Albemarle County History 35/36 (1977/1978): 7–122 (portrait on 9); Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company annual reports (1840–1871), Records of the Board of Public Works, Record Group 57, LVA; Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Company Records, Robert Alonzo Brock Collection, Huntington (microfilm copy at LVA); correspondence in Ellis and Allan Company records, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Munford-Ellis Family Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, and in several collections, VMHC; Virginia Case Files for United States Pardons (1865–1867), United States Office of the Adjutant General, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Petersburg Daily Courier, 5 Mar., 1 Dec. 1870; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 30 Nov. 1870; Richmond Daily Whig, 30 Nov. 1870; estate inventory in Richmond City Fiduciary Account Book, 104:421–423, 105:71–81; obituaries in Richmond Dispatch, 22 July 1900, Richmond Times, 22 July 1900, and Richmond Evening Leader and Richmond News, both 23 July 1900.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Martin Stakes Lane.
How to cite this page:
Martin Stakes Lane, "Charles Ellis (28 March 1817–21 July 1900)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Ellis_Charles, accessed [today's date]).
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