I went to college in a town called Sewanee, Tennessee, northwest of Chattanooga. Local lore held that Keaton filmed "The General" on location there, or very nearby. But I've never really heard definitivly. The landscape of the movie certainly looks like that part of the country, although it's supposed to be Georgia.
If anyone knows where the movie was shot, please let me know.
The General was made in and around Cottage Grove, Oregon.
According to Marion Meade's biography of Buster Keaton, an earlier plan to film in eastern Tennessee fell through when owners of the railroad involved learned that the movie would be a comedy. Descendants of some of the original participants in the "Andrews Raid" protested, so the production went to Oregon instead.
Remember, in 1926 there were still quite a few surviving Civil War veterans (my great-grandfather, who was a veteran, was still around then), so filmmakers had to be careful about this sort of thing. And it may have been a factor in The General's comparative failure at the box office when it was first released: some of the critics, even sophisticates like Robert E. Sherwood, felt that this wasn't a proper subject for comedy.
Wow, thanks for the info Wmorrow...
However, I was just reading an article on this website: www.filmsite.org/gene.html
It said the train scenes were filmed in Oregon and other scenes were filmed in Cowan, Tennesse, near where I went to college. Do you have information about which scenes may have been filmed in Cowan, or is that filmsite.org article incorrect?
I can't say for sure that the filmsite.org article is wrong, but the books on Keaton (biographies by Marion Meade and Rudi Blesh) only mention Oregon. [Can't find my copy of Tom Dardis' bio of Keaton but I think he only mentioned Oregon as well.] Blesh's book says that they went to Oregon because the terrain was relatively unspoiled and the trains were historically appropriate. And Meade's book specifically said that filming in Tennessee was called off because of the protests by descendants of Andrew's Raiders.
. . . so maybe the guy who wrote the filmsite piece has turned up some new info?
I don't know if any parts were filmed in Tennessee, but the Oregon location was near Cottage Grove, in the Willamette Valley. Cottage Grove is known for its covered bridges. It was also featured in a more recent movie, as the town for the closing parade in "Animal House", which was set at the University of Oregon in Eugene, 20 miles to the north.
Sewanee:
My Mother was raised in Cottage Grove, allthough she was only 3 when the movie was made, Her dad, my grandfather had a job of delivering the US mail from horse back up the Row River. This is a river that run up to Dorena and beyond. He told me once that alot of the movie was filmed up in this area, as there was a logging train that ran up the river. He told me that he remembers seeing the actors and film crews in Cottage Grove and up the river. This is what I was told by him if this helps
The mention of Dardis' book made me curious, so I dug mine out. In it he mentions they tried to use the actual stolen locomotive in chattanooga but they were denied permission. He quotes Keaton about Tennesee as a potential for filming:
"I went to the original location, from Atlanta, Georgia, up to Chattanooga, and the scenery didn't look very good. In fact, It looked terrible. The railroad tracks I couldn't use at all, because the Civil War trains were narrow-gauge, so I went to Oregon."
I haven't read Silent Echoes, which is all about Keaton's filming locations, but the Silent Echoes feature on the Keaton Plus DVD only mentions Oregon as well.
Silent Echoes only has pictures from Cottage Grove and the surrounding areas, for this movie. The book doesn't go into great detail about the filming; its main intent is to show 'then and now' pictures of Keaton's filming locations, such as the bend in the river where the Texas fell through the bridge (final proof that the engine WAS removed from the river in WWII).
Silent Echoes is a Keaton book I would recommend, even though it's not long on text. I find it fascinating to compare how the locations looked in the 1920s to their modern incarnations. In some cases, such as 'The General', much of the scenery is hardly changed, but in urban settings, often only one building facade or old trolley track remains to show.
I'd recommend the book to any student of Keaton or silent films.