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Chapel Hill

by John H. Kuehl, editor, Private Varnish Magazine
Article first appeared in PV volume 9, No. 6, 1987
Reprinted with permission of the author.

   Only one private car, DeWitt Chapple Jr.'s Chapel Hill, has been at all ten conventions of the American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners.
   Chapel Hill was originally built as the Hussar for stock broker and investment banker E.F. Hutton in 1922 at the St. Charles, Mo., plant of American Car & Foundry in lot 9336 to plan 2081. At the time, Hutton was married to Post cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and chairman of the board of directors for Postum Cereal Company which became General Foods in 1929.
   The future stock broker and business executive was born in New York, son of a farmer. An early school chum was future financier and economist Bernard Baruch.
   Hutton was let go from his first job as mail boy for a Wall Street firm when he took an unauthorized vacation. Next he found employment writing checks for a Manhattan bank but his penmanship was so bad he was requested to attend night school to improve his writing skills. Personally offended, Hutton quit. But he did go on to learn shorthand, studying economics and finance as well.
   Hutton helped found and became a partner in his first brokerage venture in 1905, organizing his own brokerage house, E. F. Hutton and Company, nine years later.
   In his later years, E. F. Hutton, an enthusiastic supporter of Americanism and the free enterprise system, was a syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune: his column appearing in sixty newspapers nationwide.
   In 1949 Hutton founded the Freedoms Foundation which gives awards to individuals and organizations promoting patriotic ideals.
   During his lifetime, Hutton was also a director for a number of large companies including Coca-Cola and Chrysler.
   Hutton married heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post two years after the death of his first wife in 1918. Post was the only child of Postum Cereal Company founder C. W. Post. The Huttons' only child, a daughter, became actress Dina Merrill.
   Post had been well prepared to inherit her father's multi-million dollar company. In addition to a regular education, Post was also trained by her father in business operations and techniques, toured company factories and sat in on company meetings. The training paid off handsomely. Marjorie Post developed excellent organizational and corporate skills. Company acquisitions over the years, many initiated by Marjorie herself, multiplied her inherited fortune several times over.

   Her father once said of his daughter, "If Marjorie were cast ashore on a desert island, she would pass the time organizing the grains of sand."
   After his marriage to Post, Hutton took a leave of absence from his own company in 1921 to join the cereal manufacturer. Two years later he was elected chairman of the board of directors, a position he continued to hold until he and Post were divorced in 1935.
   The Hussar was used for company business as well as to transport the Huttons between their principal New York City residence and Mar-A-Lago, their Hispano-Mooresque winter estate in Palm Beach and camp Topridge, the couple's summer retreat in the Adirondacks of upstate New York.
   No doubt, there was entertaining aboard too. Marjorie Post was a woman noted for her beauty and vitality who greatly enjoyed entertaining, richly deserving her reputation as a lavish hostess.
   Post was a careful dieter, exercised regularly and abstained from smoking and alcohol. At least part of the reason for traveling by private car has been attributed to her fear of infection from other people's germs.
   The Huttons were divorced in 1935 and E. F. Hutton resigned from his position at General Foods. The Hussar became a part of Marjorie Post's settlement. Post remarried, this time to wealthy Joseph E. Davies, a Washington, D.C., attorney and ambassador to the Soviet Union (1936-38) and Belgium (1938-39). Shortly after the Davies left for the Soviet Union, the Hussar was offered for sale and purchased by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway in February 1937.
   A Pullman air-conditioning system, complete with roof ducting, was installed almost immediately after the car was acquired. Hussar also lost its name and was assigned office car number 2 on March 4, 1937. The car was renumbered trice more before the year was out. In April it became number 8 and then 3 in September. In November of 1947, the car was renumbered once again to 13 and finally back to 3 just two months later.
   A major shopping in August of 1957 saw the entire window line modernized. Other exterior changes over the years found roller bearings added to the trucks, the open-platform rebuilt and the service door relocated from the vestibule at the head end of the car on the kitchen side to the opposite side of the car across from the kitchen and pantry.
   The C&O made quite a few changes to the interior of the car too. The observation room was built for Hutton at ACF with three individual chairs, a short sofa on the aisle side of the room and a half-length sofa against the wall of State Room D. Under C&O ownership the floor plan of the observation room change a number of times and the floor plan shown here [see Layout page] represents the observation room only at the time this particular plan was drawn in October of 1963.

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