Land acquisition for railroads

When railroads were constructed in antebellum America, land acquisition was one of the first hurdles that had to be overcome. A company's desired route might appear as a continuous line on a map, but creating that continuous line required careful piecing together of a jigsaw puzzle from the various owners of land along the route. Some landowners might be willing to part with their land readily, eager for the compensation offered, while others could prove more obstinant. Any one landowner along the route could stymie the entire work, and so railroad corporations took the process of acquisition seriously in order to not delay construction.

But landowner complaints could go right up to the very last minute. In 1839, construction contractor Asa Sheldon went to a site along the route he was working on with a load of materials, clearly ready to begin work. Neighbors to the landowner drew up their animal teams in order to block his progress, and the landowner, a woman, soon arrived on the scene to block the way as well. The land was muddy, and so Sheldon brought a plank for her to stand on so she did not get wet and dirty. One of Sheldon's colleagues asked him why he did not simply force the woman out of the way and begin construction. Sheldon responded that “for more than twenty years I have not been in the habit of driving more than half way over so handsome a woman as that.” Sheldon's compliment “brought a smile to her face and loosened her tongue,” and shortly thereafter the woman stepped aside and construction began on this section of the railroad.

Constructing the railroad was not just a matter of land acquisition through legal battles or financial settlements. Railroad employees occasionally had to think on their feet and use whatever tricks or charm they could to move construction forward.

Source: Asa Sheldon, Yankee Drover: Being the Unpretending Life of Asa Sheldon, Farmer, Trader, and Working Man, 1788-1870 (1862; repr. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 122-3.