By Gordon Anderson | gordon@rantnc.com

For many of the earliest years of its existence, very little was actually known about the man for whom Sanford was named.

Col. Charles O. Sanford was the civil engineer who oversaw the building of the railroad and operations of the depot around which the city sprang up in the mid 1870s and which still stands today at the heart of downtown. He was born in 1811 in New York City, and was the depot agent here around 1872. He apparently wasn’t in the area for too long, despite his influence on the city’s name, having died in Petersburg, Va. of malaria in 1883.

But even today, we don’t know much more. Sanford’s centennial celebration in 1974 was the impetus for learning more about Charles Sanford, according to an article published in The Sanford Herald’s centennial edition that year.

“Six months ago, all we knew was that the town was named for the engineer who ran the Raleigh and Augusta Airline Railroad here where the new town developed,” then-Chamber of Commerce Vice President Hal Siler told the Herald in 1974.

Some scholarship has been done since then, but not much. Local historian James Comer provided The Rant with a copy of Sanford’s obituary, which gives a brief rundown of his railroad career but doesn’t mention the city named in his honor. The obituary does include the fact that his body was taken from Petersburg – “in accordance with his own request” – to Savannah, Ga. for internment.

The Herald’s 1974 centennial piece includes information about a local named H.E. Adams, who visited Sanford’s final resting place in the city’s Laurel Grove cemetery that year while on a trip to see family. At the time, Adams confirmed via cemetery records that Sanford was indeed buried there, although at the time there existed no permanent marker noting his presence there (it was unclear at publication time if that’s been rectified in the last 50 years). The Herald’s story notes that there were others with the last name Sanford buried at Laurel Grove (website Find A Grave confirms at least six others, all buried between 1871 and 1890), and that Siler at the time sent letters to people named Sanford who were then living in Savannah. Further information is difficult to come by.

There is at least one memorial to Sanford in the city founded around the depot he once managed – and it’s often mistaken for his final resting place. Buffalo Cemetery, located at the intersection of Carthage Street and Firetower Road next to the historic Buffalo Presbyterian Church, features a marker with Sanford’s birth and death dates as well as the caption “famous civil engineer for whom the city of Sanford, North Carolina was named on Feb. 11, 1874.”

Despite it being known that Sanford was buried in Georgia, Find A Grave’s entry for Buffalo Cemetery erroneously lists the stone as a marker of his final resting place. The circumstances around the placement of the memorial are also unclear, but the prevailing thought is that it was placed around the time of Sanford’s centennial celebration in 1974. The marker sits on a piece of ground very close to the location of a time capsule that was buried at Buffalo Cemetery to mark the occasion (city leaders considered and decided against unearthing the capsule for the sesquicentennial, choosing instead to wait until the city’s 200th birthday in 2074).

Comer’s copy of Sanford’s obituary includes Sanford’s autograph (which is described as “authentic, being taken from letters of Col. Sanford on file at the Railroad House”) as well as the only known likeness of the man, drawn in the 1970s by Siler.

Image of Col. Charles O. Sanford drawn by former Sanford Chamber of Commerce President Hal Siler in 1974, along with a copy of Sanford’s obituary from 1883. Courtesy of James Comer.

It’s unknown just how accurate that likeness is, however, as there exists no known photograph of Charles Sanford (photography was still a relatively new but by no means unheard of technology in the 1870s). Instead, Comer’s scholarship indicates the drawing was “an artist’s interpretation of descriptions.”

Siler’s drawing, which was done in connection with the 1974 centennial celebration, according to some who spoke to him at the time was based not just on “descriptions” but also his general sense of what a railroad engineer in the 1870s might have looked like.

The above information represents the bulk of what is publicly known about Col. Charles O. Sanford.

But given Sanford’s long history with railroad work, and the fact that the CSX Transportation is (in the simplest terms possible) the successor company to the Raleigh and Augusta Airline Railroad for which he worked, it’s entirely possible there are more records – or even just small details – hiding somewhere in either historical or corporate record books.

If you have information about the life of Charles O. Sanford, get in touch via email at gordon@rantnc.com