The Impact of Railways from 1800-1914

Paper Summary:

With the 20th century, the railroad reached maturity. Railroad building continued on a fairly extensive scale in some parts of the world, notably in Canada, China, India, and the former Soviet Union. This paper discusses how railways conditioned the development of the economy (including industrialization and improvements in agriculture), society (including urbanization and immigration), and politics (in war as well as in peace) in the United States and these four countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries (1800-1914). Paper includes a graphic and table.

From the Paper:

"There was a lot of land to be explored in the United States during early 19th century. The survey map shown in Figure 1 below is the earliest in the United States that shows a commercial "tramroad." This map was drawn in Pennsylvania in October 1809 by John Thomson and was entitled "Draft Exhibiting . . . the Railroad as Contemplated by Thomas Leiper Esq. From His Stone Saw-Mill and Quarries on Crum Creek to His Landing on Ridley Creek" In 1873, the Thomson family donated the 1809 map to the Delaware County Institute of Science to substantiate the claim that the map and Leiper's railroad were the first such work in North America (Ward 1980). In 1826 a commercial tramroad had been surveyed and constructed at Quincy, Massachusetts, by Gridley Bryant, with the machinery developed by Solomon Willard. This railway used horsepower to haul granite for building the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, four miles to the wharf on the Neponset River (Boorstin 1965)."

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