Fairfax Harrison

Who was Fairfax Harrison?

Fairfax Harrison was an American lawyer, businessman, and writer. The son of the secretary to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Harrison studied law at Yale University and Columbia University before becoming a lawyer for the Southern Railway Company in 1896. By 1906 he was Southern's vice-president of finance, and in 1907 he helped secure funding to keep the company solvent. In 1913 he was elected president of Southern, where he instituted a number of reforms in the way the company operated.

By 1916, under Harrison's leadership, the Southern had expanded to an 8,000-mile network across 13 states, its greatest extent until the 1950s. Following the United States' entry into World War I, the federal government took control of the railroads in December 1917, running them through the United States Railroad Administration, on which Harrison served. An economic boom after the war helped the company to expand its operations; Harrison worked to improve the railroad's public relations and to upgrade the locomotive stock by introducing more powerful engines. Another of his concerns was to increase the amount of railroad track and to extend the area serviced by the railway. Harrison struggled to keep the railroad afloat during the Great Depression, and by 1936 Southern was once again showing a profit. Harrison retired in 1937, intending to focus on his hobby of writing about historical subjects including the roots of the American Thoroughbred horse, but he died three months later in February 1938.