agriculturist engineer Financier superintendent
He was born on November 10, 1810 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, United States, of English-Irish and Scotch-Irish ancestry. His parents were Ralph and Catherine (Conyngham) Peters; his paternal grandfather was Richard Peters, 1744-1828, Revolutionary leader and federal district judge.
His formal education began at the age of five and continued until his family, after financial reverses, moved first to Wilkes-Barre (1821). In Philadelphia he studied mathematics, drawing, and writing for eighteen months.
In Bradford County (1823 or 24) Richard worked on a farm and led an outdoor life. With a few dollars which he had made in the maple-sugar business he went to Philadelphia, where he studied for work in the office of William Strickland, the architect; here he spent six months. Being predisposed to a more active life, and, according to his own account, unfitted for architecture, he assisted in the construction of the Delaware Breakwater, and then for a short time became an assistant engineer in the location of the Camden & Amboy Railroad. An old friend, J. Edgar Thomson, the chief engineer of the newly organized Georgia railroad, made him an assistant engineer.
Peters went to Georgia in 1835, having landed at Charleston and continued his journey over the new Charleston & Hamburg Railroad. He was so successful in surveying the Georgia road, carrying on his work as far as Madison, that two years later he was made superintendent. He immediately became intensely interested in this road, and showed his faith in its future by investing his savings in it. He gave full sway to his inventive genius by devising a spark arrester, and he arranged for running trains in the night by improvising sleeping quarters in the coaches and constructing a headlight on the locomotive by burning pine knots on a sand bed, constructed in front of the smokestack. On the completion of the Georgia Railroad to Marthasville (1846) he resigned the superintendency.
In the meantime (1844), he had set up a stage line from Madison, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama, a business which he continued until the competition of the Atlanta & West Point Railroad, completed a few years later, led him to transfer his stages to a route from Montgomery to Mobile. He continued the latter route until the outbreak of the Civil War.
His interest in promoting transportation facilities westward was shown further by his election in 1860 to the presidency of the Georgia Western Railroad, and after the Civil War by his directorship of the Atlanta & West Point Railroad. Moving to Atlanta soon after the completion of the railroad to that point, he developed an unbounded faith in that growing railway center and he continued as one of its greatest promoters until his death.
In 1847 he had bought 1, 500 acres of land in Gordon County and with slave labor developed it into a model plantation. Here he experimented with the best strains of live stock and introduced new plant crops to the South. He bought from the Ural Mountains Angora goats, and he brought to the South some of the finest breeds of horses and cattle; he promoted the raising of sorghum in the South, and reestablished silk culture. He promoted these interests by occasionally contributing articles to various magazines.
When Sherman burned Atlanta he fled to Augusta, but he was among the first to return and help rebuild the city when connections were reopened. He worked for the removal of the capital from Milledgeville to Atlanta in 1868, and three years later he was a chief promoter in the construction of eleven miles of street railway, becoming president of the company the following year. In 1870 he became one of the lessees and directors of the Western & Atlantic Railway, running from Atlanta to Chattanooga.
Though he had no political ambitions, he became a member of the city council soon after the war, and in the early eighties he was elected a county commissioner. With all his wealth, estimated at over a million dollars, and with his varied interests, Peters found time to be extremely kind and considerate in all his business and social dealings.
He died in Atlanta.
In politics he was a conservative Whig, who opposed secession but loyally accepted the new order when Georgia seceded. During the war he responded to all calls for aid, and at the same time greatly increased his wealth by organizing a blockade-running company. After the Civil War he became a Democrat.
He had a robust physique and handsome features.
On February 18, 1848, he married Mary Jane Thompson of Atlanta, and to them were born nine children, three daughters and six sons.
