YOUNG, CHARLES G. (1816-1871). Charles G. Young, businessman and railroad promoter, was born in New Hampshire on April 7, 1816. He graduated from Philadelphia College and in 1838 moved to Louisiana, where in the 1850s he was president of the Vicksburg and Shreveport Railroad Company. About 1861 he moved his family and slaves to Texas. In 1863 he organized a smelter in Cherokee County, employing seventy-five white men and several hundred blacks. In addition to the foundry, Young operated a sawmill, brickyard, and store, which he supplied by wagontrain from Galveston and Matamoros. The business failed some time after the end of the Civil War,^qv following a boiler accident and a jayhawker raid on the store. Young's Cherokee Furnace Company was taken over in 1867 by stockholder T. L. Philleo. Young helped charter the Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company in 1866 and on June 1, 1867, became president of the company. He was killed in an accident near Houston on August 9, 1871. Young's reminiscences of early railroad history were published by W. S. Adair in the Dallas Morning Newsqv on December 7, 1924.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vera Lea Dugas, "Texas Industry, 1860-1880," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59 (October 1955). Houston Daily Telegraph, August 24, 1871. S. G. Reed, A History of the Texas Railroads (Houston: St. Clair, 1941; rpt., New York: Arno, 1981).