Fairfax Harrison

Reginald Fairfax Harrison (March13, 1869 – February2, 1938) was an American lawyer, businessman, and author. A 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 network across 13 states, its greatest extent until the 1950s. In December 1917, months after the United States entered World War I in April, the federal government took control of the railroads, 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 the railroad's track and to expand the area it served. Harrison struggled to keep the railroad industry afloat during the Great Depression, but 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. Provided by Wikipedia