An early visitor to Lawrence University

While researching early American transportation at the Huntington Library, I read several journals of people who made trips to the Midwest. I was pleasantly surprised to come across one account of someone visiting my alma mater, Lawrence University, in 1858, when the school was just 11 years old.

Edward G. Faile was a businessman who took a trip from Buffalo to Minneapolis in 1858, and on November 4 he stopped in Appleton, Wisconsin. He wrote the following brief note in his journal: "Arrived at Appleton at 9 PM. Left at 6 AM on the 5th. Appleton on a bluff some 60 feet above the River. Has a primary school attached to College of 250 schollars. Both sexes. College class about 70 males and same females both sexes been admitted to the college or females may take a separate course, & graduate." At the time, Lawrence had a preparatory school in addition to the college; the first college class graduated in 1857.

Faile's description is a brief one, but he clearly picked up on Lawrence's early commitment to coeducation. In his history of Lawrence, Charles Breunig writes that "by 1856-57, there was no difference between the preparatory courses for men and women" although women could pursue music and "ornamental branches." The college courses were not fully integrated until 1867, but (as Faile alluded) the college nevertheless allowed women the option to take the same college courses as men "as early as 1854-55," and Breunig notes that "numerous women chose this option, including two out of the three in the first graduating class" (pages 31, 34). 

The Lawrence University Archives was kind enough to confirm that Faile's assessment of enrollment matches with their own records for 1858: roughly 70 men and 50 women in the college and 170 students in the preparatory school. Faile's comment is short, but plainly he found Lawrence's coeducational program worthy of note as he journeyed west.

Sources: Edward G. Faile, Diary of a trip from Buffalo, N.Y. to Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 22-December 2, 1858, HM 40040, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Charles Breunig, "A Great and Good Work": A History of Lawrence University, 1846-1964 (Appleton, WI: Lawrence University Press, 1993).

What's in a name? "Railroad" vs. "the cars"

Keyword searches are a wonderful boon to research. When I started researching railroads years ago, I quickly saw that Americans did not quickly settle on one spelling for the railroad. Depending on the sophistication of the search engine, I would do single or multiple searches for "rail road," "rail-road," and "railroad."

But while combing through antebellum records, I also noticed a different term often used to describe the railroad: "the cars." Trains consist of groups of cars, and this seemed to be a linguistic linkage to an older type of transport, the horse-drawn cart or carriage. When I was new to the subject, I didn't even know that this would be a possibility, but it neatly illustrated the challenge of the keyword search: I had to know how things were referred to at the time in order to get the best results. Only by getting into the primary documents and learning about "cars" could I make sure that I was getting all the results.

Google Books's Ngram Viewer allows us to see how "railroad" eventually overtook all competitors for the chief way to refer to this technology ("railroad" is in green, "cars" in blue, "rail-road" in orange and "rail road" in red; click chart to enlarge it):

Despite the quick ascent of "railroad" (it overtakes all competitors in 1835 and never looks back), "cars" still enjoyed a modest rise throughout the antebellum era. To me, this chart illustrates not only the importance of the iterative process of research (search for material, read the material to learn new terms, and search again) but also the variety of ways in which antebellum Americans referred to this new technology. Most of them rode the railroad, but even in the late 1850s plenty of Americans were riding in the cars.

Finding lodging in the rural antebellum South

As part of my ongoing research, I've been reading the very interesting diaries of Elizabeth Steele Wright, which are held at the Library of Congress. In what I have read so far, Wright, her husband, and their dog Growler traveled via horse and coach around the southern United States in the late 1840s. Most of my research heretofore has been on steam travel, so I've enjoyed learning more about the mechanics of this different type of travel (although, unfortunately, the reason for their travels is not quite yet clear at this stage of my research).

One issue which comes up again and again is the question of overnight lodging: when the sun went down, where would the Wrights and Growler rest for the evening? They appear to have stayed with strangers when deep in the rural South, lodging with local families wherever they happened to have stopped for the evening. Wright scrupulously recorded in her journal the names of the families with which they lodged and the amount which the Wrights paid the morning they departed. Although she didn't hesitate to comment on the poor quality of food or beds, she never mentions any haggling over the amount paid. There appears to have been a common understanding between travelers and locals: travelers would be taken in, but would willingly pay the amount asked the next morning.

The amount paid could vary. The night of December 23, 1848, the Wrights stayed with a planter who owned thirty slaves in rural Georgia. The next day, they departed and "our bill was nothing." With another family in January 1849, they awoke their temporary host from his drunken stupor and paid him two dollars. Later that month in Atapulgus, Georgia, they paid one dollar and had "no fault to find with the bill." In rural Alabama that February, "we had a first-rate breakfast. the lady put up a fine luncheon for us our bill was only two dollars. where we get the best fare there they are moderate with their bills." But not all the meals were appetizing. When staying with a widow and her two daughters elsewhere in rural Alabama, Wright reported that supper "consisted of corn bread, fried ham, and eggs, coffee without any cream or sugar. I think if we had to drink coffee that way, that we would not drink much."

The Wrights never seem to have had trouble finding a place to stay, but they were clearly dependent on the kindness of the people they encountered along the way. During one stretch of their journey, the Wrights drove through 25 miles of "barren country, with only now and then a house." The Wrights stopped at a house, and the lady there noted that she "did not like to take us in as her husband and servants were away, but the next house was five miles ahead, so she said that she would not turn us away."

In larger towns the Wrights could find hotels, but most of their lodging was with private families along their route. These families appear to have put them up mostly without complaint, and the Wrights in turn paid what was requested upon departure. Elizabeth Wright's journal provides a marvelous window into this tacit understanding between traveler and host.

D.K. Minor in the digital age

In March 1910, the University of Illinois library received a bound set of the first sixty volumes of the American Railroad Journal from A. H. Grant of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Grant's stationery proclaims him to have been a "Dealer in Technical Periodicals Only" ("Services Prompt - Prices Reasonable - Terms Cash"). Grant closed his letter asking that the library make the "earliest possible remittance, as I had to pay cash, not an easy matter at this time of year."

One hundred years later, the university partnered with the Internet Archive to make these same bound volumes available over the internet. I found the volumes (including Grant's letter, scanned in the the first volume) through HathiTrust, a staggering collection of online materials from a consortium of research libraries. HathiTrust takes the time and effort to get the metadata correct, meaning that searches can be executed with Library of Congress subject headings and a host of other methods.

D. K. Minor began publishing the American Railroad Journal in January 1832. At the time, railroads powered by steam were hardly a sure bet. Yet Minor believed that the time was right for a journal dedicated to internal improvements. He made his goal clear in the very first issue, stating that he wanted to "diffuse a more general knowledge of this important mode of internal communication, which, at this time, appears to engage the attention of almost every section of the country." The American Railroad Journal was an exceptionally important resource for me when writing Railroads in the Old South, since I could mine its pages for evidence that southern railroad developments were engaged in a broader, national conversation about internal improvement. Minor's journal existed during the nullification controversy and the run-up to the Civil War, allowing me to judge how railroad promoters balanced sectional politics with their goals of a national system of internal improvements.

At the time of its publication, Minor's journal was read all over the country, as the lists of subscribers printed in the journal attested. Now that the journal is available on the internet, his goal of "diffus[ing]" knowledge about railroads is even easier to accomplish. While I don't regret the time I spent hunkered over the microfilm version of the journal when I was researching my first book, I am certainly glad to see that this critical source for U.S. railroad history available online.

Additional reading: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, volume 2, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1938), pages 297-300 covers the history of the journal. See also "One Hundred Years with the Railroads," Railway Mechanical Engineer 105 (October 1932): 385-392, 401.

"Get Off the Track!": Sheet music and railroads

While doing research at the American Antiquarian Society, I was struck at the large amount of sheet music which included railroads as a theme: "Locomotive Polka," "Railroad March for the Fourth of July," "Railroad Quick Step," and so on. Some of this sheet music included handsome illustrations of trains on the cover. In the remarkable case of the "Alsacian Railroad Gallops" by J. Guignard (1845), the railroad is even incorporated into the bars of music:

The beginning of the piece is marked "Moderato - The Train is in Motion," and by the third stave the marking has changed to "Allegro - Look Out for the Locomotive!" The chromatic run at the bottom of page is marked to mimic the "smoke and hissing of the locomotive." You can find a larger image here. It is posted online courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, The Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University.

Another example which caught my eye is "Get Off the Track!" published in 1844 and written for the Hutchinson Family Singers, known for their abolitionist songs. "Get Off the Track!" is no exception:

There is a lot happening in this image (larger version here; it is posted online courtesy of the Library of Congress). Front and center, a carriage marked "Immediate Emancipation" is pulled along by an engine marked "Liberator," a reference to William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper. In the background, the trains of Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay are crashing into ruin. The lyrics of the song make the political message even clearer, referring to Clay explicitly and van Buren by his nickname (underlining is in the original): "Rail Roads to Emancipation / Cannot rest on Clay foundation / And the tracks of 'The Magician' / Are but Rail Roads to perdition."

Railroads here form an apt metaphor for the message the Hutchinsons were trying to get across: railroads move swiftly and directly to their destination, a perfect image for the goal of immediate emancipation.

Other examples of railroads and sheet music abound (many more at the Johns Hopkins site linked above), but these two strike me as some of the most compelling: In the Alsacian case for the ingenuity of the design and in the abolitionist case for recruiting technology as a metaphor for political action.