THE COMPLETION OF THE KCP&G - A CENTENNIAL HISTORY
By Lowell G. McManus
The main line of the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad between Kansas City and Port Arthur was completed with the driving of the last spike in the vicinity of milepost 754, west of Mauriceville in Orange County, Texas, at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 11, 1897. Arthur Edward Stilwell, the railroad’s enigmatic 37-year-old President and chief promoter was not present for the occasion, but was attending a horse show in Independence, Missouri. This presentation is concerned with events surrounding the completion of the KCP&G to the Gulf of Mexico one hundred years ago.
On December 3, 1892, with the railroad reaching only as far south as Pittsburg, Kansas, its directors approved Stilwell’s proposal to change its name from Kansas City, Nevada, and Fort Smith to Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf. They also approved the goal to build toward an eventual maritime terminus at Sabine Pass, Texas. Well before KCP&G rails ever reached Joplin, Missouri, in 1893, Stilwell had already moved quickly to acquire two existing railroads: one line from Texarkana, Texas, to Morris Ferry near Horatio, Arkansas (the 44-mile Texarkana & Fort Smith Railway); and another from Joplin, Missouri, to Sulphur Springs, Arkansas (the 51-mile Kansas City, Fort Smith and Southern Railroad). KCP&G materials from the period speak of building to Sabine Pass or “some city on the Gulf of Mexico.” Idealized maps were published showing a line to Sabine Pass, probably chosen as the railroad’s initial Gulf Coast goal because it was the nearest ocean port to Kansas City.
In any case, Sabine Pass was a small port town on the Texas side of the waterway of the same name connecting the Gulf of Mexico with Sabine Lake, the estuary of the Sabine and Neches Rivers. Ironically, Sabine Pass had gotten its first railroad when Arthur Stilwell was in diapers. The Eastern Texas Railroad had built 25 miles of track from Sabine Pass to Beaumont in 1861. The outbreak of war prevented operation, however, and the rails were salvaged in 1863 by Confederate Lieutenant Richard W. Dowling for use in construction of fortifications to protect the pass. From their rail fort, Dowling and 42 men sank two gunboats and turned back an invasion force of 1,500 Union troops. The line was rebuilt in 1881 by the Sabine and East Texas, which became part of Southern Pacific’s Texas & New Orleans the following year.
As construction on the KCP&G was progressing very slowly on the mountainous 235-mile segment between Sulphur Springs and Horatio during 1894, Stilwell appears to have been developing two parallel strategies for his line between Shreveport and the Gulf and keeping his options open. Maybe the KCP&G would build to Sabine Pass--or maybe it would reach the Gulf through assimilation of whatever existing line might become available.
Under both Texas and Louisiana laws then in force, railroads could only operate in those states through subsidiaries headquartered there. Stilwell already had a Texas company in the form of the Texarkana and Fort Smith, and he took out a Louisiana charter for the Kansas City, Shreveport and Gulf Railway Company on September 27, 1894. Construction quickly began from Texarkana southward and from Shreveport northward simultaneously. These two companies also signed contracts for construction between Shreveport and Sabine Pass, but the contracts were with another Stilwell entity and could easily have been cancelled.
By early 1895, no decision had yet been made on what to do south of Shreveport. It was around that time that the Houston, East and West Texas Railway was offered for sale. Stilwell rushed to New York and obtained an option to buy it at the price of $3,000,000--far cheaper than he could build to Sabine Pass. The HE&WT, and its Louisiana subsidiary the Houston and Shreveport Railroad, operated a 231-mile line that connected Shreveport and Houston via Logansport, Nacogdoches, Lufkin, Livingston, and Cleveland. Stilwell was soon negotiating with the Galveston, La Porte & Houston, then under construction, for access from Houston to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston. As Stilwell assembled his directors in Kansas City to ratify the HE&WT purchase, it looked as though rails would never be laid from Shreveport to Sabine Pass. If Stilwell’s writings late in life are to be believed--and that is quite a stretch--we have last-minute intervention from the spirit world to thank for the very existence of the southern end of the KCS Gulf Division as we know it today.
Stilwell shunned the mainline churches and was an active follower of Christian Science. His beliefs on spiritualism, however, were far beyond anything in the teachings of his church. In his 1921 books The Light That Never Failed and Live and Grow Young, Stilwell claimed that he had been visited in his sleep throughout his career by spirits, whom he called “Brownies.” These beings, he said, had not only given him the plans for his railroads, the city of Port Arthur, and other business ventures, but had dictated to him 20 novels, books, poems, songs, and screenplays and had inspired his dedication to the causes of pacifism and world disarmament. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he wrote, “that these messages come from the spirit world, and that this circle of spirits that communicates with me by this rare method is comprised of engineers, poets, and authors.” In 1922, he said that he had kept his Brownies secret during most of his life for fear that people would think him a “nut.” Perhaps this is why he called these influences “hunches” in his autobiography serialized in The Saturday Evening Post during 1927 and 1928. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a two-volume History of Spiritualism in addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, declared that no man then living had enjoyed greater psychic experiences than Arthur Stilwell.
Back in the spring of 1895, on the night before his directors were to decide the purchase of the HE&WT, Stilwell experienced what he described as possession by an overpowering fear. He wrote many years later that a voice told him not to purchase the HE&WT because Galveston was to be destroyed by a storm.
Stilwell cancelled the HE&WT deal, and departed immediately for Sabine Pass in his private car over the Southern Pacific. There he was unsuccessful in coming to terms with the owners of the land surrounding the town, so he withdrew inland several miles up the Southern Pacific to the northwest shore of Sabine Lake and there purchased 46,278 acres. He would later claim that it had been his intention to place his terminal there all along, having been shown a vision of a city of 100,000 connected to the Gulf by a deep-water canal around the shallow lake’s western shore. He denied that he had ever intended to build to Sabine Pass. With a characteristic lack of modesty, Stilwell hastened to announce that the new city would be called “Port Arthur.” Actually, the city’s genesis as the railroad’s maritime terminus probably had more to do with Stilwell’s unsuccessful negotiations at Sabine Pass than it did with visions and Brownies.
During the winter of 1895-96, Port Arthur was laid out, and the Southern Pacific did a brisk business transporting Stilwell back and forth with groups of real and potential investors. During 1896, the KCP&G’s Texas subsidiary, the Texarkana & Fort Smith, began work on a huge Spanish Colonial station in Port Arthur and its own line to Beaumont. It is significant that Port Arthur was already being established a full year before KCP&G track was completed between Mena and Horatio in Arkansas.
It was finally possible for a KCP&G train to run from Kansas City to Shreveport as of March 2, 1897, and there interchange with other lines reaching the Gulf ports of New Orleans and Galveston. In May, dredging began on the Port Arthur ship channel. During the spring and summer of 1897, The Kansas City, Shreveport and Gulf pushed very rapidly southward through the western tier of Louisiana parishes. The then division point of Hornbeck was reached on June 8th, and De Quincy was attained a month later. There, the new line met the rails of a 16-mile narrow-gauge logging road that it had purchased earlier in the year. What is essentially today’s Lake Charles Branch had been the Calcasieu, Vernon and Shreveport Railway. It had been standard-gauged and was ready to convey Stilwell’s trains to the Southern Pacific west of Lake Charles. Using temporary SP trackage rights from there to Beaumont, through service could finally begin between Kansas City and Port Arthur. The first passenger train covered the route in 36 hours.
At De Quincy, Louisiana, Stilwell’s main line would turn sharply southwestward and make a bee line for Beaumont. He had originally conceived a more direct route to Port Arthur, but citizens of Beaumont prevailed by raising $35,000 and offering free land for the main line to come there. Crews worked from both De Quincy and Beaumont to close the gap. As always, all Texas construction was under the auspices of the Texarkana & Fort Smith.
On September 11th, the driving of the last spike near Mauriceville was marked by only minor ceremony where it occurred. Stilwell, the master promoter, had planned the major festivities for places where they would generate maximum publicity. The company sponsored events in Mena, Shreveport, and Beaumont, but the grandest celebrations were those in Kansas City and Port Arthur.
So it was that Stilwell was in a private box at a horse show at Independence’s Fairmount Park, when a cannon was fired on an adjacent hillside, and a billboard was unveiled reading “Kansas City is now connected with its own seaport, Port Arthur, by its own rails, the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf. The last spike has just been driven.” A band played the “Port Arthur March,” and that night searchlights placed atop several downtown buildings symbolized Kansas City as a beacon of commerce.
By the time the railroad was finished, Port Arthur had several hotels, two newspapers, two banks, two churches, a school, a saloon, electricity, a 2,000-foot pleasure pier into Sabine Lake, and an agricultural experiment farm. The population was 860. On the afternoon that the last spike was driven, a number of excursion trains rolled into town from Kansas City and other locations. There were speeches, parades, music, and dancing with plenty of food and drink for all as the celebrations ran late into the night.
In those days before modern meteorology, or even wireless communication with ships at sea, coastal communities had no knowledge whatsoever of approaching storms. Before daylight on the morning following the celebrations, a major hurricane hit Port Arthur. With revelers swelling the city’s population to several times normal, and with many new residents still living in tents, water flowed five feet deep in the streets. Many people sought refuge from the storm in an unfinished KCP&G roundhouse, which collapsed killing four. Altogether, 13 people died, many homes were destroyed, and the pleasure pier was severely damaged. Stilwell donated $15,000, sent a relief train, and ordered immediate repairs. One can only speculate as to why his Brownies had not foreseen the storm. In a Congressional hearing on the establishment of customs facilities at the new port, Stilwell was asked about the effects of the hurricane on his ship channel. He replied, “It only wet the water.”
For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was mismanagement, the KCP&G was in deep financial trouble by 1899. The Kansas City Southern Railway Company was incorporated on March 19, 1900, and on April 1st it took control of the KCP&G properties after purchasing them at a public foreclosure sale in Joplin, Missouri. Stilwell was to have no part in the management of the new company.
Had Stilwell been right to build his railroad to Sabine Lake rather than to purchase the HE&WT? Two events vindicated his decision, regardless of how he might have reached it. On September 8 and 9, 1900, Galveston, Texas, was destroyed in the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. A hurricane storm surge at least 15 feet high swept over the entire island with the loss of more than 6,000 lives. Then, just four months later, on the tenth day of the 20th century, Anthony F. Lucas brought in the oil well that ushered in the petroleum age. The “Lucas Gusher” was a thundering 200-foot geyser of crude oil that ran wild for nine days just a mile from the KCS track at Spindletop on the south side of Beaumont. That one well produced 3.2 million barrels of oil during its first year. Neither Texas nor the KCS would ever be the same again. Such names as Texaco, Gulf, and Mobil were born along the KCS between Beaumont and Port Arthur.
The curious dogleg in the KCS between De Quincy and Beaumont proved to be a useful part of a developing east-west rail corridor. Early in the current century, trackage rights were granted to the Beaumont, Sour Lake & Western Railway to connect it with the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railway at De Quincy. These were both members of the Frisco Gulf Coast Lines, which, eventually passed through bankruptcy and into the Missouri Pacific fold. The trackage rights survive today and enjoy heavy use as part of Union Pacific’s main route between New Orleans and Houston.
The HE&WT soon passed to the Southern Pacific, and became part of SP’s line between Houston and East St. Louis. Today, it, too, is Union Pacific.
In 1906, the KCS donated the Port Arthur ship channel to the United States government. Within two years, the Corps of Engineers had improved it and extended it up the Neches River to Beaumont and up the Sabine River to Orange.
Southern Pacific abandoned the lower 10.2 miles of its line to Sabine Pass in 1932, pulling the end of track back to Port Arthur. Today, Union Pacific continues to serve Port Arthur along with the KCS. Sabine Pass is now a pleasant village in the marsh, and it lies within the corporate limits of the City of Port Arthur.
The greater Port Arthur area has given the world Tex Ritter, Steve McQueen, and Janis Joplin. The 1990 combined population of Port Arthur and its three adjacent suburbs of Port Neches, Groves, and Nederland was 104,403--almost exactly the 100,000 foreseen by Arthur Stilwell.
The following references are acknowledged as essential in the preparation of this presentation:
Arthur E. Stilwell, by Keith L. Bryant, Jr.
Rails South, by John Milton Womack
Texas Railroads, by Charles P. Zlatkovich
Louisiana Railroads, by Michael M. Palmieri
Texas Almanac, by the A. H. Belo Corporation
Travelers Railway Guide, by The American Railway Guide Company
Saga of Kansas City Southern Lines, by the Kansas City Southern Railway Company
On December 3, 1892, with the railroad reaching only as far south as Pittsburg, Kansas, its directors approved Stilwell’s proposal to change its name from Kansas City, Nevada, and Fort Smith to Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf. They also approved the goal to build toward an eventual maritime terminus at Sabine Pass, Texas. Well before KCP&G rails ever reached Joplin, Missouri, in 1893, Stilwell had already moved quickly to acquire two existing railroads: one line from Texarkana, Texas, to Morris Ferry near Horatio, Arkansas (the 44-mile Texarkana & Fort Smith Railway); and another from Joplin, Missouri, to Sulphur Springs, Arkansas (the 51-mile Kansas City, Fort Smith and Southern Railroad). KCP&G materials from the period speak of building to Sabine Pass or “some city on the Gulf of Mexico.” Idealized maps were published showing a line to Sabine Pass, probably chosen as the railroad’s initial Gulf Coast goal because it was the nearest ocean port to Kansas City.
In any case, Sabine Pass was a small port town on the Texas side of the waterway of the same name connecting the Gulf of Mexico with Sabine Lake, the estuary of the Sabine and Neches Rivers. Ironically, Sabine Pass had gotten its first railroad when Arthur Stilwell was in diapers. The Eastern Texas Railroad had built 25 miles of track from Sabine Pass to Beaumont in 1861. The outbreak of war prevented operation, however, and the rails were salvaged in 1863 by Confederate Lieutenant Richard W. Dowling for use in construction of fortifications to protect the pass. From their rail fort, Dowling and 42 men sank two gunboats and turned back an invasion force of 1,500 Union troops. The line was rebuilt in 1881 by the Sabine and East Texas, which became part of Southern Pacific’s Texas & New Orleans the following year.
As construction on the KCP&G was progressing very slowly on the mountainous 235-mile segment between Sulphur Springs and Horatio during 1894, Stilwell appears to have been developing two parallel strategies for his line between Shreveport and the Gulf and keeping his options open. Maybe the KCP&G would build to Sabine Pass--or maybe it would reach the Gulf through assimilation of whatever existing line might become available.
Under both Texas and Louisiana laws then in force, railroads could only operate in those states through subsidiaries headquartered there. Stilwell already had a Texas company in the form of the Texarkana and Fort Smith, and he took out a Louisiana charter for the Kansas City, Shreveport and Gulf Railway Company on September 27, 1894. Construction quickly began from Texarkana southward and from Shreveport northward simultaneously. These two companies also signed contracts for construction between Shreveport and Sabine Pass, but the contracts were with another Stilwell entity and could easily have been cancelled.
By early 1895, no decision had yet been made on what to do south of Shreveport. It was around that time that the Houston, East and West Texas Railway was offered for sale. Stilwell rushed to New York and obtained an option to buy it at the price of $3,000,000--far cheaper than he could build to Sabine Pass. The HE&WT, and its Louisiana subsidiary the Houston and Shreveport Railroad, operated a 231-mile line that connected Shreveport and Houston via Logansport, Nacogdoches, Lufkin, Livingston, and Cleveland. Stilwell was soon negotiating with the Galveston, La Porte & Houston, then under construction, for access from Houston to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston. As Stilwell assembled his directors in Kansas City to ratify the HE&WT purchase, it looked as though rails would never be laid from Shreveport to Sabine Pass. If Stilwell’s writings late in life are to be believed--and that is quite a stretch--we have last-minute intervention from the spirit world to thank for the very existence of the southern end of the KCS Gulf Division as we know it today.
Stilwell shunned the mainline churches and was an active follower of Christian Science. His beliefs on spiritualism, however, were far beyond anything in the teachings of his church. In his 1921 books The Light That Never Failed and Live and Grow Young, Stilwell claimed that he had been visited in his sleep throughout his career by spirits, whom he called “Brownies.” These beings, he said, had not only given him the plans for his railroads, the city of Port Arthur, and other business ventures, but had dictated to him 20 novels, books, poems, songs, and screenplays and had inspired his dedication to the causes of pacifism and world disarmament. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he wrote, “that these messages come from the spirit world, and that this circle of spirits that communicates with me by this rare method is comprised of engineers, poets, and authors.” In 1922, he said that he had kept his Brownies secret during most of his life for fear that people would think him a “nut.” Perhaps this is why he called these influences “hunches” in his autobiography serialized in The Saturday Evening Post during 1927 and 1928. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a two-volume History of Spiritualism in addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, declared that no man then living had enjoyed greater psychic experiences than Arthur Stilwell.
Back in the spring of 1895, on the night before his directors were to decide the purchase of the HE&WT, Stilwell experienced what he described as possession by an overpowering fear. He wrote many years later that a voice told him not to purchase the HE&WT because Galveston was to be destroyed by a storm.
Stilwell cancelled the HE&WT deal, and departed immediately for Sabine Pass in his private car over the Southern Pacific. There he was unsuccessful in coming to terms with the owners of the land surrounding the town, so he withdrew inland several miles up the Southern Pacific to the northwest shore of Sabine Lake and there purchased 46,278 acres. He would later claim that it had been his intention to place his terminal there all along, having been shown a vision of a city of 100,000 connected to the Gulf by a deep-water canal around the shallow lake’s western shore. He denied that he had ever intended to build to Sabine Pass. With a characteristic lack of modesty, Stilwell hastened to announce that the new city would be called “Port Arthur.” Actually, the city’s genesis as the railroad’s maritime terminus probably had more to do with Stilwell’s unsuccessful negotiations at Sabine Pass than it did with visions and Brownies.
During the winter of 1895-96, Port Arthur was laid out, and the Southern Pacific did a brisk business transporting Stilwell back and forth with groups of real and potential investors. During 1896, the KCP&G’s Texas subsidiary, the Texarkana & Fort Smith, began work on a huge Spanish Colonial station in Port Arthur and its own line to Beaumont. It is significant that Port Arthur was already being established a full year before KCP&G track was completed between Mena and Horatio in Arkansas.
It was finally possible for a KCP&G train to run from Kansas City to Shreveport as of March 2, 1897, and there interchange with other lines reaching the Gulf ports of New Orleans and Galveston. In May, dredging began on the Port Arthur ship channel. During the spring and summer of 1897, The Kansas City, Shreveport and Gulf pushed very rapidly southward through the western tier of Louisiana parishes. The then division point of Hornbeck was reached on June 8th, and De Quincy was attained a month later. There, the new line met the rails of a 16-mile narrow-gauge logging road that it had purchased earlier in the year. What is essentially today’s Lake Charles Branch had been the Calcasieu, Vernon and Shreveport Railway. It had been standard-gauged and was ready to convey Stilwell’s trains to the Southern Pacific west of Lake Charles. Using temporary SP trackage rights from there to Beaumont, through service could finally begin between Kansas City and Port Arthur. The first passenger train covered the route in 36 hours.
At De Quincy, Louisiana, Stilwell’s main line would turn sharply southwestward and make a bee line for Beaumont. He had originally conceived a more direct route to Port Arthur, but citizens of Beaumont prevailed by raising $35,000 and offering free land for the main line to come there. Crews worked from both De Quincy and Beaumont to close the gap. As always, all Texas construction was under the auspices of the Texarkana & Fort Smith.
On September 11th, the driving of the last spike near Mauriceville was marked by only minor ceremony where it occurred. Stilwell, the master promoter, had planned the major festivities for places where they would generate maximum publicity. The company sponsored events in Mena, Shreveport, and Beaumont, but the grandest celebrations were those in Kansas City and Port Arthur.
So it was that Stilwell was in a private box at a horse show at Independence’s Fairmount Park, when a cannon was fired on an adjacent hillside, and a billboard was unveiled reading “Kansas City is now connected with its own seaport, Port Arthur, by its own rails, the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf. The last spike has just been driven.” A band played the “Port Arthur March,” and that night searchlights placed atop several downtown buildings symbolized Kansas City as a beacon of commerce.
By the time the railroad was finished, Port Arthur had several hotels, two newspapers, two banks, two churches, a school, a saloon, electricity, a 2,000-foot pleasure pier into Sabine Lake, and an agricultural experiment farm. The population was 860. On the afternoon that the last spike was driven, a number of excursion trains rolled into town from Kansas City and other locations. There were speeches, parades, music, and dancing with plenty of food and drink for all as the celebrations ran late into the night.
In those days before modern meteorology, or even wireless communication with ships at sea, coastal communities had no knowledge whatsoever of approaching storms. Before daylight on the morning following the celebrations, a major hurricane hit Port Arthur. With revelers swelling the city’s population to several times normal, and with many new residents still living in tents, water flowed five feet deep in the streets. Many people sought refuge from the storm in an unfinished KCP&G roundhouse, which collapsed killing four. Altogether, 13 people died, many homes were destroyed, and the pleasure pier was severely damaged. Stilwell donated $15,000, sent a relief train, and ordered immediate repairs. One can only speculate as to why his Brownies had not foreseen the storm. In a Congressional hearing on the establishment of customs facilities at the new port, Stilwell was asked about the effects of the hurricane on his ship channel. He replied, “It only wet the water.”
For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was mismanagement, the KCP&G was in deep financial trouble by 1899. The Kansas City Southern Railway Company was incorporated on March 19, 1900, and on April 1st it took control of the KCP&G properties after purchasing them at a public foreclosure sale in Joplin, Missouri. Stilwell was to have no part in the management of the new company.
Had Stilwell been right to build his railroad to Sabine Lake rather than to purchase the HE&WT? Two events vindicated his decision, regardless of how he might have reached it. On September 8 and 9, 1900, Galveston, Texas, was destroyed in the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. A hurricane storm surge at least 15 feet high swept over the entire island with the loss of more than 6,000 lives. Then, just four months later, on the tenth day of the 20th century, Anthony F. Lucas brought in the oil well that ushered in the petroleum age. The “Lucas Gusher” was a thundering 200-foot geyser of crude oil that ran wild for nine days just a mile from the KCS track at Spindletop on the south side of Beaumont. That one well produced 3.2 million barrels of oil during its first year. Neither Texas nor the KCS would ever be the same again. Such names as Texaco, Gulf, and Mobil were born along the KCS between Beaumont and Port Arthur.
The curious dogleg in the KCS between De Quincy and Beaumont proved to be a useful part of a developing east-west rail corridor. Early in the current century, trackage rights were granted to the Beaumont, Sour Lake & Western Railway to connect it with the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railway at De Quincy. These were both members of the Frisco Gulf Coast Lines, which, eventually passed through bankruptcy and into the Missouri Pacific fold. The trackage rights survive today and enjoy heavy use as part of Union Pacific’s main route between New Orleans and Houston.
The HE&WT soon passed to the Southern Pacific, and became part of SP’s line between Houston and East St. Louis. Today, it, too, is Union Pacific.
In 1906, the KCS donated the Port Arthur ship channel to the United States government. Within two years, the Corps of Engineers had improved it and extended it up the Neches River to Beaumont and up the Sabine River to Orange.
Southern Pacific abandoned the lower 10.2 miles of its line to Sabine Pass in 1932, pulling the end of track back to Port Arthur. Today, Union Pacific continues to serve Port Arthur along with the KCS. Sabine Pass is now a pleasant village in the marsh, and it lies within the corporate limits of the City of Port Arthur.
The greater Port Arthur area has given the world Tex Ritter, Steve McQueen, and Janis Joplin. The 1990 combined population of Port Arthur and its three adjacent suburbs of Port Neches, Groves, and Nederland was 104,403--almost exactly the 100,000 foreseen by Arthur Stilwell.
The following references are acknowledged as essential in the preparation of this presentation:
Arthur E. Stilwell, by Keith L. Bryant, Jr.
Rails South, by John Milton Womack
Texas Railroads, by Charles P. Zlatkovich
Louisiana Railroads, by Michael M. Palmieri
Texas Almanac, by the A. H. Belo Corporation
Travelers Railway Guide, by The American Railway Guide Company
Saga of Kansas City Southern Lines, by the Kansas City Southern Railway Company
