Photo by Slambo, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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About Merci Box Car of New Hampshire
Merci Box Car of New Hampshire information and pictures. France sent 49 Box Cars that make up the Merci Train. These Box Cars contained gifts to show thier gratitude for relief the United States sent to France after World War II. New Hampshire's Merci Box Car is located in Manche
History
New Hampshire's Merci Box Car is one of the 49 cars of the French Gratitude Train — the Merci Train — sent by France in 1949 to thank the American people for the Friendship Train, more than 700 boxcars of food and supplies Americans had shipped to Europe in 1947. The idea came from Andre Picard, a French railroad worker and World War II veteran, and more than six million citizens of France and Italy contributed gifts: dolls, statues, clothing, furniture, ornaments, even a Legion of Honour medal said to have belonged to Napoleon. The gift-laden freighter Magellan, painted with the words MERCI AMERICA, docked at Weehawken, New Jersey on February 2, 1949 before a crowd of more than 25,000, and the cars — each carrying five tons of donated presents — were distributed one to every state plus the Territory of Hawaii. New Hampshire's car is among the 43 survivors still on public display, preserved as the state's tangible piece of this transatlantic thank-you.
The Trains
The exhibit's centerpiece is the boxcar itself: a French 'forty-and-eight,' so called because the type was rated to carry forty men or eight horses. These World War I-era cars were built beginning in the 1870s as ordinary freight boxcars, then pressed into military service by the French army in both World Wars — and later used by the occupying German forces and finally the Allied liberators before France selected 49 of them for the 1949 gratitude shipment to America.
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