The patriarch of the family, Robert Garrett (1783-1857), was born in Ireland and immigrated with his family to Pennsylvania in 1790. In 1801 he moved to Baltimore, where he started a dry-goods and grocery business in 1819. By 1840 it had developed into Robert Garrett and Sons. The firm grew to become an investment-banking house with interests in western trade. To support this business Garrett fostered the fledgling Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. His son, the first John Work Garrett (1820-1884), became president of this railroad in 1858, having been nominated for the post by his friend and neighbor Johns Hopkins, for whom the well-known Baltimore university is named. During the Civil War this John Work Garrett, grandfather of the book collector, was sympathetic to the Confederacy, but he placed his railroad at the disposal of the federal government. He engineered the first military rail transport in history, moving Union troops from the Potomac to Chattanooga in 1863. Garrett's railroad also took President Abraham Lincoln to Antietam to visit Union soldiers. Because Garrett allowed the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to supply Union troops and provide scouting reports, Maryland Confederates blamed him for the failure of Southern troops to capture Washington, D.C.
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