The beginning of our tour...

1826 Map of the United States.
Click on the image to go to more maps at the University of Alabama

First off, I think that for anyone to understand railroads, why they were built in particular locations and how they operate, it's necessary to understand some things about transportation in the 19th Century.

The Valley Turnpike
Courtesy of the Massachusetts Commandery Military Order of the Loyal Legion and the U.S. Army Military History Institute

In 19th Century America there were no paved roads like we know and love today. You had turnpikes, which were macadamized roads and generally considered to be "toll" roads. These were the Interstate Highways of the day. The downsides for transporting goods over turnpikes were that you had to pay tolls and you were limited to how much you could carry on your wagon. This isn't too bad on level ground, but there are some mountains that people have to deal with if you want to move goods from the lush interior of the Midwest to the teeming markets in the East.

Okay, so what if you do have a lot of stuff to move, like a lot of grain or coal. How do you move that in such a way that you aren't using 100 wagons? Anyone want to guess?

You use boats!

Boats allow people to transport a lot more weight than wagons and in many cases we didn't have to build any of the highways, nature did a lot of that for us. Yes, the great river systems of the country were the first highways for bulk transport of goods since the time of the earliest settlement. By the 19th Century they have been supplemented by canals.

Four Boats Dock Along the C&O Canal
C&O Canal NHP

The 1820's saw an explosion of canal construction in the United States. For those of us on the East Coast, there were three that we're going to be most interested in:

1.) The Erie Canal

2.) The Pennsylvania Canal

3.) The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

The Erie Canal via the Hudson River served to connect New York, NY with Ohio.

The Pennsylvania Canal connected Philadelphia with Pittsburgh and the Ohio River

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal connected Washington, DC, Georgetown and Alexandria with Cumberland, MD, but it's original goal was the Ohio River.

Notice that there is a major east coast seaport that is missing here: Baltimore, MD

Why didn't Baltimore have a canal?

Well, the short answer is that Baltimore's river didn't go far enough west. The Patapsco River goes as far as Mt. Airy, MD, about 40 miles west. From there one has a pretty substantial way to go to get to the next river. All of the other canals were able to follow a major waterway for a goodly portion of their routes (the Pennsylvania Canal was an exception. They had to create a portage over the mountains. For more info on that click HERE.)

Baltimore decided to go with a different way west...they decided to invest in a Rail Road.

Books you can read to learn more:

For the big picture I recommend What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History.)

For more about canals I recommend Wedding of the Waters by Peter L. Berstein about the Erie Canal and Towpath Guide to the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal by Thomas F. Hahn.
(You can get that from the NPS bookstore for the C&O Canal NHP or buy it on the web. I searched using google and found several listings.)

If you want to read ahead...and you know who you are. Start reading this book before my next post: The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853 by James Dilts.

You may also find Impossible Challenge II: Baltimore to Washington and Harpers Ferry by Herbert Harwood to be of use. It's available from the B&O Railroad Historical Society just click on the link for the company store.

Introduction

This past weekend I wast at Monocacy National Battlefield Park and met a visitor from Washington State. We got to talking about the battlefield and as I was a local, I was pointing out the pertinent sites to the battle and throwing in some of the local and railroad history. It turns out this visitor was a historian with the Washington State Park System and he asked, "Do you do historical intrepretation?" I replied no, and he said, "Well, what you're doing now, it's historical interpretation."

That comment lodged in my head for a while and I've realized that there's a lot of railroad history out in the wide wide world here that has no interpretation. So, I've decided to create a blog where I can do that.

So, now I'm going to get things ready for my first post.