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.

Snakeheads, again

One of the challenges of assessing antebellum travel is the lack of comprehensive accident statistics. In a previous post, I suggested that while stories of "snakeheads” (rails snapping loose and flying up through the bottom of carriages) were perhaps not as widespread as their prominence in some memoirs of the period suggests. (In the comments section of that post, a reader helpfully provided a few more examples.) While researching a series of railroad advertisements from the antebellum era, I recently came across another data point on the subject which I found of interest.

In an 1844 advertisement for its new line of cars, the Phoenix Line in Pennsylvania boasted that its cars were "all new and of a very superior quality, both for safety and comfort.” One aspect of this safety was the fact that "the bottoms of all the Cars are lined with heavy boiler iron, so that in case of a break or loose rail on the road, it will be impossible for any thing to penetrate or break through the bottom of the Cars." Clearly, this company felt that it had an important safety measure worthy of the public's attention. In all my reading on antebellum railroads, this is the first time that I've seen a specific reference to this type of safety measure in an advertisement: usually, advertisements boasted about the speed of travel or the convenience of connections. Nevertheless, it seems that the management of the Phoenix Line felt that this was worthy of the public's notice, and might help assuage any fears they had about travel.

So: while we many never know exactly how many rails posed a danger to travelers by snakeheads, this advertisement offers another way in which they were part of the contemporary conversation about travel, not just in the memories of travelers after the antebellum era.

The quotation is courtesy the American Antiquarian Society, which holds a copy of the broadside.

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.

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.