Abstract
This article examines the contested and unprecedented process by which the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad laid tracks through Baltimore’s city streets in the 1830s. Laying tracks in busy thoroughfares raised profound questions about the meaning of urban space and the economic function of the city. Track opponents held that city streets should remain open to free-flowing traffic and condemned railcars for monopolizing public space. Track advocates countered that urban prosperity was rooted in the rapid, efficient movement of goods. This was not a battle of traditionalists versus progressives but a clash between competing visions of urban modernity. Examining these competing urbanisms gives us a window into the spatial dynamics of capitalism and the ways in which industrialization reconfigured local space.
Introduction
Baltimore grocer and Pratt Street resident Philip D. Uhler supported building a rail link between his city and the trans-Appalachian West when it was framed as an abstract proposition. Uhler purchased stock in the fledgling Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), the first corporation of its kind in the United States, as soon as it became available in 1828. Yet he opposed the company’s plans for carrying western trade into the city. He led efforts against an early proposal to stretch the road around the northern limits of the city and terminate at Fells Point, fearing it would unfairly redistribute trade away from his neighborhood in West Baltimore. Later, he denounced the placement of the road down Pratt Street, predicting that railcars would disrupt traffic patterns and endanger lives on that busy thoroughfare. Once the B&O extended tracks along Pratt Street to the waterfront, Uhler was one of the principal circulators of a petition calling for the removal of these rails as dangerous obstructions and impediments to the “ordinary use of the street.” To Uhler’s personal misfortune, the tracks remained. In September of 1837, merchants unlocked a B&O car parked on a steep incline on Howard Street in order to load it with flour. They lost control of the car and it rolled downhill, striking Philip Uhler’s wife as she crossed the street. Both of her legs were crushed, and she died of her injuries two weeks later. 1
The story of Philip Uhler’s progress from railroad adversary to bereaved widower exemplifies both the opposition to and the effects of the spatial transformations wrought by the railroad in the city. The questions of how, where, and whether the railroad would enter Baltimore and integrate with urban infrastructure were never merely technical matters; they had the power to alter citizens’ interactions with their environment and the city’s relationship with its hinterland. The track debates in the 1830s centered around three interrelated questions: first, which neighborhoods or districts should be the primary beneficiaries of the western trade; second, how best to conduct the delivery and transshipment of goods within the town; and third, how citizens, travelers, and corporations ought to interact with the urban environment. These questions manifested themselves initially in conflicts over the destination of the road, as advocates from various parts of town argued that their neighborhood was the “natural” terminus for the railroad. Settling this question only raised new disputes over the distribution of incoming freight, as some defended the rights of draymen and carters to the carrying trade while others posited that the railroad’s rapid transfers and quick transshipment were the keys to urban prosperity. Running through these debates were concerns about how railroad cars would transform their surroundings and alter the way pedestrians and drivers moved in the city.
This paper examines the spatial effects of and discourses surrounding the placement of railroad tracks in Baltimore’s city streets. As Baltimore was the first city in the United States to contemplate the implications of rail travel for urban space, it would be easy to dismiss popular objections to street tracks as timidity in the face of technological novelty. But track debates served as a forum in which urbanites articulated competing conceptions of the city. Urban rails were at the center of ongoing negotiations in the 1830s concerning how, and in whose interest, the city was to be managed and regulated. The B&O and its supporters articulated a commercial vision of the city’s future, in which accelerating the pace and increasing the number of transactions would position Baltimore at the center of a national economic system. For track opponents, the rails reflected the imposition of private commercial privilege on public space, sacrificing the safety of citizens and widespread prosperity for the benefit of a rapacious few. These debates over municipal priorities took the form of conflicts over free movement through the streets—whose movement would be privileged, and whose would be curtailed. In the politics of motion in Baltimore’s streets, we can see a material manifestation of Jacksonian debates over monopoly and private power.
As in other political disputes in Jacksonian America, fierce rhetoric sometimes obscured the substantial material and financial interests at stake. Competing interests contended with one another in the language of political economy, natural advantage, and civic responsibility. Yet arguments made to advance special interests or reinforce property regimes took on new salience when aired in public, becoming the basis for broad-based political action on questions of urban form and movement. The conversation that took place in the 1830s over the place of rail in the urban fabric reflects the structural limits of political action in antebellum America. Although the conversation cut across class boundaries, it was circumscribed by race and gender; women were present only as symbolic shorthand for ideas about progress, while the voices or interests of African Americans appear not to have entered the discourse at all. These limitations are manifest in the document trail that the track debates left behind: petitions signed by hundreds of citizens and newspaper reports of mass meetings, all of which document how a sizable subset of Baltimore’s citizenry turned questions of private advantage into matters of public planning, insisting on their own participation within that process.
Many historians have considered how railroads affected urban development, though few have devoted attention to the role of rail technology in the production of local spaces and urban social life. In the American context, studies of railroad depot architecture and urban hierarchies abound, but only recently have scholars considered the place of rail infrastructure in shaping public space, drawing attention to the power of tracks to transform popular promenades into industrial spaces and create new neighborhoods by virtue of their presence. 2 Historians of European railways have commented more extensively on their effects on urban development and life, but few major European cities placed tracks through city streets as in the United States. 3 Studying the B&O’s City Division does more than just fill in a gap in rail studies, though: it illuminates the ways in which new mechanisms of commercial exchange and personal travel shaped ideas about urban space. 4 At issue were novel patterns of movement—fluid and frictionless, train travel meshed uneasily with existing traffic patterns and threatened to reduce Baltimore from an Atlantic entrepot to a mere place of transit for goods and merchants bound further north. Imposing the infrastructure of long-distance travel on local streets prompted a clash between competing visions of urban modernity that played out over more than a decade in the birthplace of American railroading. These debates were in turn restaged in cities up and down the eastern seaboard, as politicians in New York City and Philadelphia cited Baltimore’s experience while advancing their own claims about how best to regulate urban rail infrastructure. Track debates marked the beginnings of a conversation about the place of through traffic in the urban fabric that would continue well into the automobile age. 5
Laying Tracks in the City
The B&O originated in an economic crisis. The B&O’s founders—a self-selected collection of Baltimore’s mercantile, financial, and political elite—conceptualized the railroad project as a response to the Erie Canal and other internal improvements threatening to funnel the agricultural produce of the growing trans-Appalachian West to New York and Philadelphia. The founders—a group that included, most famously, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—conceived the railroad at a meeting held on February 12, 1827, in the parlor of financier and dry goods merchant George Brown. 6 They dreamed up the project in private but cast it as a public urban improvement, a means by which “Baltimore” could counter the exertions of “New York.” The city was to be the agent behind this endeavor, and it was the city that would be fattened by its trade. 7 The B&O’s founders and supporters understood commerce in distinctly material terms, as the movement of goods from one place to another, along the path of least resistance from the site of production to the market. Local boosters repeatedly characterized urban decline as “grass growing in the street,” casting a conceptual link between the city’s commercial fortunes and street-level traffic; the decline of one meant the decline of the other, and without wagon wheels to beat down vegetation sprouting between cobblestones, the city itself would be reclaimed by nature, the settlement overgrown by weeds. 8 As such, while the western railroad was organized by wealthy men, they cast its success as a matter of existential import for Baltimore as a whole, a logic that persuaded the municipal government and the State of Maryland to provide half the start-up capital for the new venture. 9
For Baltimore to hold a singular identity, one had to think of it as a point on a map; once talk shifted to the more grounded realm of the street, the city’s coherence dissipated. The prospect of introducing railroad tracks to Baltimore’s built environment instigated a prolonged argument over how trade should be distributed within the city. Baltimoreans anticipated that the trade with the interior (still a projection rather than a reality) would have the power to radically reshape the spaces and economy of the city. A railroad depot would generate enough commercial activity to create new neighborhoods or destroy old ones by relocating and concentrating sites of exchange. Longtime B&O counsel John H. B. Latrobe, recollecting the debates forty years later, remarked that property owners saw the railroad as “a vast watering pot, the smallest of whose tricklings was to fertilize the spot it fell on.” 10
Imagining that future prosperity was at stake, Baltimore’s property owners mustered a variety of arguments as to why the central railroad depot should be located in their neighborhood. Public opinion in the city fractured along geographic lines. Property owners in West Baltimore pushed for the retention of Mt. Clare Station as the primary point of deposit while their counterparts in East Baltimore pressed for the termination of the line at the deep water wharves of Fells Point. Each claimed that their area held the “natural advantage”: the west because traffic would not have to pass through the city and the east because of its ability to handle seaborne transshipment. More saliently, each was home to new developments—Canton, America’s first industrial park, in the east and Mt. Clare, rapidly developing as a center of manufacturing and workers’ housing, in the west. Through anonymous newspaper editorials and pamphlets, property owners in each section accused their rivals of corrupt machinations while claiming their own position was informed only by the public good (Figure 1). 11
B&O routes through the city, proposed and adopted.
Attempting to mediate these interests, the municipal government instructed the company to introduce the railroad to the city in such a fashion as to retain the present balance of property values, neither benefiting nor harming any neighborhood disproportionately. In May of 1828, as the B&O readied for its July 4th commencement, Solomon Etting, one of City Council’s representatives on the B&O Board of Directors, wrote to company president Philip E. Thomas to inquire about plans for entering Baltimore. It was time, he suggested, for the railroad to fix a path within the city, and he encouraged the company to build not with a view towards “carrying the Road to the nearest point to tide water” but rather “to locate the Road with a view alone to the best interests of the present City of Baltimore, as it is now built.” 12 Etting’s concern for the local distribution of trade reflected a common fear that if the B&O’s trade did not have an outlet within the built environment, it would serve to build up a “new city” at Baltimore’s expense. 13 As such, the city’s representatives and many in the press pushed the B&O to enter Baltimore at a point “calculated to distribute the trade throughout town as now improved.” 14 The company agreed to this provision in order to secure access to the city’s streets.
In authorizing the Baltimore & Ohio to lay tracks within the city, the city and state governments specified that the company’s actions were to be subject to municipal oversight. The B&O’s charter had not specifically granted the railroad the right to place its lines in city streets, and in 1828 the legislature granted this power for the “purposes of commerce.” The law included safeguards against disruptions to existing spatial practices, specifying that the rails were to be made so as “not to interfere with the free use and travelling on said streets.” The law also required the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore to determine which streets would receive the rails. 15 Yet while the municipality could set destinations for the tracks, it was up to the engineers of the corporation to design them—the specialized knowledge required to lay tracks ensured that the process of integrating rail lines with Baltimore’s street system would be orchestrated by railroad employees.
Faced with the task of integrating its tracks with urban transportation infrastructure, the B&O was given considerable leeway by the municipal and state governments to determine its path through Baltimore. By virtue of its size and scale, the B&O represented a new type of actor in the urban landscape. Whereas Baltimore’s streets and wharves were opened piecemeal at the behest of property owners, the railroad was an institution with a permanent physical presence stretching miles beyond Baltimore’s boundaries, its operations sensitive to slight changes in topography. 16 It exerted a newly coordinated and systematized effect on the urban landscape, requiring consistent street grades and smooth interchanges between its components. The City Division was to be connected to the Main Stem in an unbroken link that tied the port of Baltimore to the western reaches of the tracks. The engineers approached urban space cautiously, developing a set of principles to guide the proposed integration of tracks and city space. The interests of rail traffic and public safety alike mandated a route remote from the built portions of the city, they determined. It was important to exclude “the bustle unavoidable in a densely populated city” from the railroad’s path, or they would face “numerous accidents, many of which might be attended with the loss of human lives.” Thus they could not place a “great leading road along a thickly settled street,” as the tracks would pose “an insurmountable barrier to the streets.” 17
Adhering to these principles, the engineers devised a roundabout route that ran from Mt. Clare to Fells Point while avoiding the dense city center, bridging or tunneling any thoroughfares encountered on the way. The proposed line formed a parabola over the city, from which branch lines could distribute the trade of the Main Stem to various neighborhoods. The advantage of this plan was that it would require significant grade changes only in the “unimproved parts of the City,” and allowed the company to avoid “material derangement of buildings or other improvements.” 18 Despite these assurances, the engineers’ proposal called for extensive changes to the surrounding landscape and drew heavy public criticism. The tunneling and bridging required would be costly, and the tracks would interfere with the existing street pattern. One concerned Baltimorean argued that there should be an election to decide on the plan, saying that the City Council should not give “Carte blanch [sic] to the Rail Road Company” to remake the urban environment without first receiving popular consent. 19
In light of these objections and wary of the heavy cost of such a route, the B&O delayed making a decision on its urban division until 1831, when it adopted a radically different approach. Rather than avoiding the built portions of the city, the tracks would now be laid directly into the heart of Baltimore. After two years of discrete surveys, the company presented its new plans for entering Baltimore to the City Council in February 1831. The engineers reversed their previous judgment, declaring that the best route through Baltimore was “by Pratt Street, to the Basin, and thence by Pratt Street to the City Block.” From this route, it would be possible to build branches to every neighborhood, while depots could be established at various points in the city to diffuse the incoming trade throughout town. 20
Whereas the original route had been designed expressly to avoid the bustle of the city, the new plan necessarily interjected the company into the everyday business and movement of downtown Baltimore. Engineers initially had rejected the possibility of a route down Pratt Street because “the business at present done” there and the “crowds with which [it is] almost incessantly thronged . . . utterly preclude the expediency and feasibility of introducing a Rail-road.” A newspaper correspondent had warned in 1829 that Pratt was “scarcely wide enough now to pass the trade upon it,” and with rail tracks down the street the residents there “would be confined to the foot pavements, or the houses be abandoned.” 21 The interest in reaching tidewater, the cost of bypassing the city, and the desire to distribute trade evenly within Baltimore persuaded the company to overlook these objections.
The B&O’s proposal stimulated political action at the neighborhood level, as urbanites fractured into clusters of support and opposition. From February to early March of 1831, ten of the twelve wards in the city called meetings to discuss the proposed extension and announce their opinions. 22 These wards were not unanimous; in a few cases, a single ward held multiple meetings representing different viewpoints. One writer complained that a meeting in favor of the tracks was composed of only “thirty or forty individuals, mostly merchants transacting business in or near Pratt Street,” within a ward of more than seven hundred voters, while a different meeting of the same ward attended by two to three hundred locals had passed anti-railroad resolutions. 23
The flood of ward announcements in Baltimore’s newspapers drew the attention of local satirists who ridiculed the self-seriousness and pomp of these local meetings. They published mock notices, targeting opponents of the plan, which criticized the wards’ petty jealousies and rote declarations of disinterest. As the participants in one fictional meeting put it, “We had rather the whole scheme of connecting Baltimore with the West should be defeated, than that our portion of the town should be made to share equally the anticipated benefits, with the other portions.” Their principal target was the form, rather than the arguments, of the meetings—the appointment of multiple officers, the lengthy preambles and resolutions, and the long-winded speeches. Thus an account of the (nonexistent) Thirteenth Ward’s meeting described the appointment of a Chairman, Assistant Chairman, Secretary, and Assistant Secretary, and the “liberal bestowment of the complimentary but empty title of Esq. on most of the gentlemen named in the appointments.” Their lengthy preamble was “neatly divided into convenient periods by capital, whereases.” Focusing on meetings’ tone and conventions allowed the satirists to target the audacity shown by track opponents in declaring publicly their opinions on this matter. For these writers, the railroad’s policies lay beyond the scope of localized political action. 24
Ward meetings opposing the B&O’s plan to build through Pratt Street challenged the authority of the railroad as a planning agent in the urban environment and contested the company’s claim that the railroad would have a minimal impact on the conduct of everyday life. The most substantial criticism of the proposal was an eight-page pamphlet composed by a meeting of “citizens of the western and south western sections of the city” chaired by Philip Uhler. The list of grievances in Uhler’s pamphlet included the concerns about distribution of trade that had been voiced the year before, but added new fears of the negative effects the railroad would have over the city’s built and social environment. The city was entering uncharted infrastructural territory—the only localities that had placed tracks through their streets were British towns much smaller than Baltimore—and the lack of precedent amplified railroad opponents’ anxieties. 25
Concerned Baltimoreans anticipated a clash between this novel technology and the densely populated urban center. The railroad would substantially alter daily urban life, from the sensory stimuli of the city to the patterns of movement within it. Uhler and other opponents of the Pratt Street extension pointed to the dangers of placing spark-producing and explosion-prone locomotives in the densely populated city center. The most pointed objections in Uhler’s pamphlet, though, concerned the tracks’ violation of the public’s customary right to the street. Iron rails jutting up from the roadbed represented a permanent imposition on public space for the exclusive use of the railroad company, hindering the free movement of vehicles even in the absence of a train. If a train were present, the disruption to established traffic patterns would be even more pronounced: iron rails reduced friction and fixed a path, so a train could neither stop quickly nor swerve out of the way. All other vehicles would have to yield to the train, making it a dominating presence in urban space. Taken to its logical extreme, the passage of trains along Pratt Street would create a physical and mental boundary cleaving the city in two, acting as “a frightful barrier between the neighborhoods on each side of the street . . . [making] communication between the two districts north and south of Pratt street . . . vastly inconvenient, embarrassing and unpleasant.” Serving the imperatives of long-distance travel would upend the very meaning of the street, turning a space that had once bound the city together into a space of disjuncture and peril. Uhler saw in the railroad a threat to urbanity as he understood it: an instrument that would speed communications but cleave community. 26
The B&O’s officials and advocates confidently rebutted these charges, promising that the railroad tracks would alter commercial and social uses of space in Baltimore minimally, if at all. In its published report on the Pratt Street extension, the Board of Directors emphasized that the cars would use animal rather than locomotive power within the city, and that the rails would be only slightly elevated, enabling all vehicles to cross without difficulty. They conceded that railcars might pose obstacles to traffic, but these could stop quickly if needed. 27 The Board assured the municipal government that their plan would introduce tracks without interrupting travel on the streets, assuring the elected officials “that there will be less interruption and danger from the passing of the Railway Cars along a street than from the passing of Drays and other Vehicles now in common use.” They added that the rails would “occasion not the smallest interruption” to general travel or to the inhabitants of the street. From the Pratt Street stem, branch roads could be constructed in any direction, diffusing the benefits of trade. 28
The Mayor and City Council approved the B&O’s plan and granted the company the authority to build its tracks down Pratt Street, but subject to conditions designed to minimize disruptions to the existing spatial order. An ordinance specified which thoroughfares could receive the tracks, and mandated that they be placed at the center of the street. The law also forbade the use of steam power within the built portions of the city, requiring the company to exchange its locomotives for horses at the Mt. Clare depot. To ensure that the railroad did not violate established patterns of movement within the city, the speed of cars was to be limited to three miles per hour, which the Council explicitly articulated as “a walking pace.” Most importantly, the law specified that if the Mayor and City Council should later find that the street railways constituted “an obstruction or impediment to the ordinary use of any street or streets,” the B&O could be compelled to remove them and “replace the street or streets in the same condition in which they were before the railway was laid down.” 29 The city attempted to render the effects of the tracks reversible. In practice though, once installed the rails would be difficult to remove.
Railroad Tracks and the Use of Urban Space
As workers laid tracks in September 1831, the Gazette said that the objections to the urban rails had already been obviated; the Pratt Street line afforded ample facilities “for the transportation of produce and merchandize into and out of our city, without in the least obstructing the customary or necessary use of the street by wagons, drays, carts and other carriages.” An out-of-towner reported that “the inhabitants find no fault with [the rails], but the contrary, knowing that in the course of a few years it will render their property doubly valuable.” 30
Despite these assurances, the presence of the rails and trains generated mandatory new traffic patterns that structured the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. The transition from the B&O’s rural track to its City Division entailed a shift from the coordinated, regular traffic of the western railroad to the ad hoc spatial order of the street. In Pratt and other Baltimore streets, drays and carts shared space with pleasure carriages, genteel pedestrians brushed against notoriously profane hackmen, and Baltimore’s enslaved, free black, and white laboring community alike found a venue for public life. In this heterogeneous environment, traffic patterns sorted themselves out as drivers negotiated rights-of-way with oncoming carriages and maneuvered their vehicles around country wagons unloading their wares. 31 The B&O’s managers found the chaotic urban environment ill-suited to the precise operations of a railroad, and set about adjusting the practices of urban life to fit their needs. Within half a year of opening the tracks on Pratt Street, the B&O requested ordinances from the City Council to regulate traffic and other aspects of street life. The company complained that “idle and mischievous persons [were] wantonly running their cars over the railways in the streets, to the iminent [sic] peril of their own lives, as well as damage to the Company.” They looked to the city to regulate the loading and unloading of cars, and pass traffic laws confining passing vehicles to the sides of the streets. They deemed such ordinances “indispensable to the preservation of the railways which may be laid down within the city.” 32
Legislation stemming from these requests defined how individuals could move in the city and interact with the new mode of transit. Some of the legal burden fell on the railroad company; any cars sitting in the street for more than an hour had to be chained up or the city would fine the Board of Directors, for example. Most of the laws, though, applied to private citizens or individual agents of the railroad. The city outlawed unauthorized movement of railcars, and instructed all vehicle drivers to pass only on the right-hand side when traveling on railed streets. 33 Ordinances penalized obstruction of foot pathways, which were newly important for circulation now that tracks occupied a portion of major thoroughfares. 34 Railroad cars were to be loaded or unloaded only at designated depots or by the express permission of nearby property owners. 35
The scope of these laws was not confined to Pratt Street: branch lines built from the main line connected various warehouses, wharves, and places of business with the railroad. The B&O had originally discussed nine potential branches that would stretch tracks through every major thoroughfare, turning the entire city into a rail yard. 36 Though they were an important component of the company’s proposed integration with the city’s infrastructure, the B&O was unwilling to pay for or maintain urban branch lines. 37 The city instead gave private property owners the right to request a track extension to their place of business, allowing them to adjust the grade of the street as necessary for “the beneficial use of the said railway.” 38 Once their application was approved, property owners could hire a contractor to build a railroad extending from Pratt Street. 39 These rules gave property owners acting cooperatively substantial power to alter the urban environment, though at their own expense and under municipal authority. 40 Shippers and merchants used this system to build tracks from Pratt Street to warehouses and wharves throughout the city. By 1839 no fewer than fifteen branches extended from the B&O onto other roads. The special challenges posed by urban operations led a Baltimore engineer to design a special curved girder for city use in 1831 that allowed railcars to make the sharp turns around streets and into warehouses. Austrian observer Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner noted that this design enabled cities to be “crisscrossed in all directions by railroads.” 41 At the same time, new rail lines from Baltimore tied the city more closely to nearby population centers. Though the B&O would not reach the Ohio River until 1853, the city had rail connections to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., by 1836 and would get another to York, Pennsylvania, shortly after. 42 Building private branch lines thus linked Baltimore merchants to markets located hundreds of miles away (Figure 2).
Baltimore’s railroad connections, circa 1838.
Wherever tracks went, their distinctive physical imprint compelled new types of behavior on the street. Some regarded the tracks as a welcome obstruction, regularizing traffic and business practices. An 1835 City Council committee praised the railroad for standardizing the city’s once-chaotic traffic patterns, finding “even less confusion & disorder now than before the track was laid down” at a busy downtown intersection. Formerly wagons had loaded goods while stretched “across the streets stopping or much interfering with the free passage,” but now they “loaded with their side to the pavement.” The imposition of track had initiated the “almost universally followed custom of the carts, drays, waggons, carriages &c. keeping on opposite sides as they pass in Different Directions.” 43 By dividing the street the tracks had imposed order on the streetscape, making it a more convenient and efficient site for the conduct of business.
The railroad’s supporters celebrated the extension of the tracks and lauded the B&O as a positive agent in the reshaping of Baltimore’s economy and built environment. A number of observers commented on an increased “liveliness” in the city, and almost all attributed this increase in activity and construction to the anticipated effects of the road to the west. “The effects of our great Western Rail road are already beginning to develop themselves,” wrote the Patriot, commenting on construction projects underway near the proposed terminus. “Thus it is that one great improvement gives impulse to many others.” The effect was nearly instantaneous, with warehouses and buildings rising up “as [if] it were by the touch of the magician’s wand.” 44 The railroad was expected to have a buoyant effect on local real estate prices, particularly in the vicinity of the tracks. As early as 1828, lots for sale near a projected depot were advertised with the pledge that the railroad would soon make the area “a scene of active business,” increasing the value of the land. Later, the Gazette reported that “along Pratt street, the increase [in property values] generally is not less than fifty per cent.” 45 The B&O’s effects extended to the city’s architecture. The railroad’s hauling capacity allowed Baltimore builders to avail themselves of previously inaccessible granite quarries nearby. The Patriot opined that widespread use of granite facades “would give a gay and, at the same time, substantial appearance to our city.” 46
Railroad supporters hailed the increasingly congested streets as further signs of growth and development; the crowded streets and bustling environment were symptoms of progress in a city that had been ailing since the end of the War of 1812. As an 1832 cholera epidemic subsided, the Gazette found the hotels and stores once again crowded with country merchants, and the streets cluttered by boxes of merchandize, noting “Our great work of Internal Improvement [i.e., the B&O], has been the principal cause of this revival—we might almost say, restoration of our former state of active commerce.” 47 In this vision, traffic and commercial prosperity went hand-in-hand. One report questioned those who fretted over congested streets: “Why Complain of the obstruction produced by Bringing Business to t[he] City—when but for that Business we should have no City[?]” 48 Niles’ Weekly Register chimed in that it was “delightful” to see the streets “blocked up by wagons, carts and drays, loaded with goods, and passing in all directions—for transportation into the interior.” 49 The increase of traffic within the city was attributed to the escalation of travel and shipment between Baltimore and other cities and locations facilitated by the railroad.
The rhetoric of bustling streets risks conveying an exaggerated impression of the daily traffic conveyed through Baltimore by the B&O in the 1830s. Over a six-day period in June, 1832, for example, 203 arriving railroad cars brought 1,490 barrels of flour, 86 tons of granite, 48 tons of paving stone, and 22 hogsheads of tobacco, among other goods, while conveying 1,014 passengers to and 1,252 passengers from the city. When combined with the 213 cars departing, the B&O’s business amounted to nearly seventy cars moving through the city daily in either direction. 50 Given that the railroad reached only as far as Frederick, some fifty miles away, this was likely a small percentage of the total traffic in a city that housed more than 80,000 people.
Yet regardless the scope or extent of urban rail travel, the presence of railroad infrastructure changed the possibilities for movement in Baltimore. As the Sun noted in 1838, a traveler could leave Baltimore at 6:30
Even as the tracks revolutionized interurban mobility, they represented obstructions and dangers to many other Baltimoreans, particularly the city’s racially mixed fleet of draymen, hackmen, and carters. These short-distance haulers solicited customers, loaded and unloaded goods and passengers, and traveled through the city streets. They paid the municipal government for the privilege of doing so—the hauling trade was regulated by the sale of licenses. As the haulers saw it, the license implied a mutual obligation—they paid for the privilege of using the streets, which in turn meant the city could not adopt measures restricting their free movement. 56 The railroad tracks, use of which was the sole prerogative of the B&O, surrendered space in the public street to an untaxed private interest. As trains deposited goods from the Ohio River Valley directly at the harbor, draymen and carters watched the much-anticipated western trade pass by without benefiting the community at large. Haulers claimed that their business had been “transfered [sic] to a Monopoly who now enjoy exclusive priviledges [sic] over certain parts of the streets without contributing one dollar for taxation to the City.” 57 The railroad seemed above rule of law. While “the poor man is compelled to pay a Tax for running his Cart &c. over the streets of the city, the Rail Road Company is permitted to block up and obstruct the streets, without paying Tax.” 58 The tracks infringed “the right of labour” because they put local trade under the control of a company that compensated its executives generously but used its “complete monopoly of the transportation thro’ the streets” to establish its “own price for labour.” 59
The accusations of monopoly applied to the company’s use of space as well as its role in local trade. Carters and draymen complained repeatedly of the ways in which tracks and trains interfered with their passage and threatened the democracy of the street. One petition in 1833 remarked that railroad cars unloading flour on Pratt Street occupied up to two-thirds of the space in the street. If another dray happened to be unloading simultaneously the entire thoroughfare would be “blocked up, forcing us to stand with a load on our Horses . . . until the receivers of Flour are willing to grant us the privilege of passing.” 60 A city commission found that these difficulties stemmed from the infrastructural requirements of the railroad. Ordinarily two vehicles meeting each other would “mutually give way . . . to allow each other to pass,” but the railroad car, “confine[d] to the rails by the flanges of its wheels,” could not “give way; every thing else must yield to it,” thus monopolizing the road and denying the community its right of “ordinary use of a street.” 61 Where the railroad’s supporters could look at the increasingly congested streets and envision a prosperous future, the draymen and their allies saw something more ominous: a breakdown of street-level democracy and the imposition of a new monopolistic spatial order.
Draymen were not the only Baltimoreans with cause to complain about the tracks. Building tracks sometimes required tearing up streets or removing pipes, and contractors frequently failed to repair damaged infrastructure. 62 The rails interrupted the flow of waste water through the gutters crossing Pratt Street. Clogged gutters collected “rubbish of various kinds” causing floods during heavy rains, and generating a powerful stench in hot weather. In winter the snow piled between the rails and the curb blocked carriage access to houses on the street. 63 Trains and tracks made vehicle driving more dangerous. Drivers often had to hurry to “leave the track clear for the approaching rail way car,” especially when their wheels were caught in the grooves of the track. Railcars “hurried” along the tracks “with irrisistible [sic] force to the demolition of every thing which obstructs its passage.” 64 The minimal friction and fixed path of the rails made railcars a new type of vehicle, unable to swerve out of the way or stop quickly. They compelled greater caution in the exercise of quotidian activities.
Urban accidents were one cost of doing business for the B&O, and the company was careful to pay indemnities to victims of street collisions so as to avoid suit without conceding liability. In Philip Uhler’s suit against the company for the death of his wife the Board instructed counsel to devise a compromise that would not “furnish a precedent which may be used to render the Company liable in similar cases.” The B&O was unable to reach a settlement with Uhler and the matter went to court; while he won his suit, the jury awarded him only $500 in damages of the $2,000 he sought. (The low award, the Sun speculated, was likely because he had remarried in the two years since his wife’s death). 65 Such accidents demonstrate the domestic and economic calculus required in the extension of rail lines. A newspaper reported that property owners in one street had “calculated” the benefits from increased rents and tenants while some “shrewd old dames . . . calculated over their tea cups how many infant victims are to suffer under the wheels of the new Juggernaut”—and “consequently resolved on additional watchfulness.” 66 Later, efforts to bring the tracks of the Baltimore & Susquehanna down High Street were opposed in part because, one newspaper disdainfully reported, “inconveniences must occur, and many children will be killed—‘oh, horrible.’” 67 Concerns about public safety were feminized and dismissed in the face of progress. The profits of the railroad justified occasional fatalities.
For children, the railroad helped change the recreational geography of the city. Railroad depots and constantly moving cars created new play opportunities for Baltimore’s youth and created an ersatz transit system whereby boys could hop on passing cars to get around the city. They presented opportunities for petty crime as well; as tracks were extended into Canton, an observer speculated that “[m]ischievous boys” were “contemplating many holiday rides along the inclined planes in stolen cars.” 68 The Sun treated accidents as a lesson for the city’s juvenile population, reminding them of the dangers of playing around the railroad tracks. When a fourteen-year-old orphan, despite warnings from the conductor, jumped on a railroad car passing along Pratt Street while running an errand, he fell under the wheels of the car, losing both his legs. “We hope this may prove a warning to youths who are in the habit of getting on the cars while they are under way,” wrote the Sun. 69 In another instance, the thirteen-year-old son of a German immigrant shoemaker was crushed between two cars at a depot. He had been sent by his father to take work home to Pratt Street, but had “taken the opportunity of playing upon the cars, by which act of indiscretion he lost his life. His dreadful fate should be a warning to the heedless boys who are daily in the habit of playing about the depot, to the annoyance of the persons employed and at the risk of their own lives.” 70
News reports of such accidents increased significantly once the sensationalist Sun opened its presses in 1837, but such reporting always underscored the quick restoration of order or the carelessness of the injured party. Their accidents were not to be blamed on the company: “Notwithstanding, the conductors are very cautious to keep the boys away from the cars, it is not strange such accidents frequently happen.” Only the victim was to blame. 71 In another incident, the handler lost control of three or four baggage and lumber trains moving down Pratt Street, and the Sun reported the ensuing chaos but reassured readers that everything was “soon put to rights, and they proceeded on their way again.” In the death of Philip Uhler’s wife, the Sun reported the “Shocking Occurrence” but concluded that “no blame can possibly attach to the gentleman who superintends the cars.” 72 While the press increasingly reported the accidents occurring on the city division of the railroad, the lesson for Baltimoreans was to remain vigilant to the new danger posed by trains in the street.
The Track Removal Campaigns
It only took a few years of experience with the urban rails to convince some citizens that the tracks had done more harm than good to Baltimore, and that they should be removed so as to restore the city to its prior condition. As early as 1833 a candidate for City Council pledged “to support the Mechanics’ and Working Mens’ Interest, by using his endeavours to remove that worst of all nuisances from the city, the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road.” 73 The City Council’s Joint Committee on Railroads joined the cause in 1834, finding the Pratt Street line to be an “obstruction and impediment to the ordinary use of said street,” citing its effect on traffic, blockage of drains, danger to pedestrians, and the railroad’s monopoly on local hauling. 74 The committee noted that the city had approved of these tracks on the assumption that they would not interfere with the ordinary use of the streets, and determined that the only remedy for these ills was “the entire removal of the Railway from the Street.” 75 Soon after the committee published its report, members of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth wards in West Baltimore convened public meetings that resolved to support track removal and see “the street restored to its former condition.” 76 The campaign to remove the tracks escalated in March of 1835. Solomon Etting, the one-time City Councilman and City Director on the B&O, circulated a petition calling for the removal of the tracks. This petition, coming from “owners and occupants of property on Pratt Street” complained that the railway interfered with their use of the street. 77 The Joint Committee reconvened and argued the railroad had not brought more goods into the city; rather it had “concentrated into the hands of a few what was heretofore done by many: it has taken away the trade formerly enjoyed by one part of the city and transferred it to another.” 78
Etting’s petition and the Joint Committee’s report aroused public attention to this matter in March of 1835 and mass petitions circulated advocating either the removal of the tracks or their permanent retention. Two petitions opposed the urban tracks. One, signed by hackmen, called for the removal of the rails for the good of their profession. The other (with Philip Uhler as one of the principal signatories) identified the tracks as unfair impositions on the public. It emphasized the need to prevent the extension of the rails to Canton and other maritime destinations, and argued that control over the fate of the tracks should not be divested from the municipality. These petitions argued for the restoration of the street to its “original” condition, so as to undo the spatial effects of the rails. Counter-petitions insisted that the tracks had benefited the city more than they had harmed it, and condemned the selfishness of those who would tear them up. But counter-petitions did not merely rebut track removal advocates’ claims; in order to forestall future debate on the subject, they asked the municipal government to declare the rails permanent fixtures in the urban environment, not subject to removal. 79
Some 2,354 Baltimoreans participated in these debates by signing or circulating the petitions. Track removal advocates placed more petitions in circulation, but only narrowly surpassed the track retention petitions in total signatures, 1,183 to 1,171. While it can be hard to determine the social backgrounds of petition signatories definitively, some trends emerge. Overall, 35 illiterate Baltimoreans signed the petitions by indicating their mark, 23 of whom supported track removal. Furthermore, while not every petition indicated the signatories’ home wards, those that do confirm the impression that track opposition was more predominant in West Baltimore while advocacy was concentrated in the eastern parts of the city. 80
These rival neighbors articulated contrasting understandings of the responsibilities of municipal government: the case for making the tracks permanent turned on the inviolable rights of property, while the opposition worried about the loss of local control and the sacrifice of public good to private interests. A Special Committee of the City Council (distinct from the Joint Committee on Railroads) argued that by consenting to the construction of branch lines, the city had voided its right to remove the tracks on Pratt Street. Branch tracks were useful only insofar as they were connected to a larger railroad network, so an ordinance removing the tracks from Pratt Street would constitute an ex post facto law impairing the obligation of contracts. By vesting other parties in the use of the tracks, the city lost the use of the safety clause allowing for immediate restoration of pre-rail condition of the streets. 81 The minority report for the Special Committee argued otherwise, warning that declaring the tracks permanent would deprive the city of “authority over the streets and highways” of Baltimore, a right held “in trust for the entire community, and under direct responsibility to the legal voters whom they represent.” To curtail the city’s autonomy in this matter would subject the community to “the perpetual dictation (in regard to a most important public concern) of a moneyed corporation,” one directed by the interests of its private stockholders and which could, through outside stock purchase, someday “pass under the control of strangers.” 82
City Council embraced the majority report and moved quickly to declare the rails permanent fixtures on the city streets, by a combined vote of 32 to 13. 83 Mayor Jesse Hunt vetoed this measure. He stated that while it was inappropriate and unnecessary to remove the tracks at present, the proposed resolution constituted “an abandonment of an important part of the contract under which the railways were laid in our streets.” He was reluctant to forego these rights, absent “the clearest possible expression by a majority of our fellow citizens in favor of such an abandonment.” 84 While the tracks remained, the right to remove them was preserved. But the extension of the tracks throughout Baltimore’s streets had created many new parties personally interested in the maintenance of urban rails. Railroad tracks were integrated into Baltimore’s economy and now a part of the city’s infrastructure. 85
B&O supporters declared that opposition to the urban tracks was selfishness in the face of the greater good, and threatened to undermine the city’s tenuous prosperity. One report from a City Council committee found “no argument in favour of removing the rail road from Pratt street, other than that of Benefiting a few spots and a few individuals at the expence of the community.” 86 Internal discord could only encourage the city’s urban rivals—a ward meeting in East Baltimore warned that the city “presents to the world the Strange spectacle of a ‘city divided against itself’ . . . to the disgrace of our city as a republican community.” 87 Track supporters thus characterized their opponent’s concerns about who would handle trade and the control of the street as trivial complaints in the face of a larger commercial crisis in which Baltimore’s long-term prosperity hung in the balance. It was these understandings of Baltimore—as a local environment or as one component in a larger regional economic network—that energized the debates over the desirability of through traffic.
A Mere Place of Transit? Railroad Tracks and Through Traffic
The question of how to handle through traffic was one of the principal points of contention in the track debates of the 1830s. Through traffic was passenger travel or freight that was carried through Baltimore but did not begin or end in the city. Two opinions crystallized on how to handle through travel, each rooted in an understanding of the city’s role as a commercial center in a national economy. The first, held by most draymen and carters and many opponents of track extension (and later, proponents of track removal), saw trade destined for other ports or urban centers as an opportunity to spread wealth within the city. They argued that passing goods through as many hands as possible was the cornerstone of urban prosperity. In a localized variant on the American System of high tariffs and internal trade, they believed the circulation of goods within the city would redound to the public weal. 88 A slow and intentionally inefficient transshipment process would make even transient goods profitable to the community; western goods bound for Philadelphia or elsewhere would be picked up at Mt. Clare, taken to the docks by drays, warehoused, and loaded onto ships. The second perspective, advanced by the railroad corporation and East Baltimore businessmen, considered the long-term commercial viability of the city dependent on its ability to attract trade and capital. By this logic, it made sense to encourage facilities for trade even for goods bound to other destinations. The railroad could bring goods and passengers traveling onward straight to the point of transfer, with as little delay as possible, and the gains in efficiency would encourage capital accumulation in Baltimore.
For track opponents, the railroad was analogous to a waterway that would not stop flowing until it reached its final outlet; if tracks went through Baltimore, then the rivers of trade would pass through to other locales. Even before the first tracks were laid, a six-part series of articles in the American compared the railroad to “a rapid stream with unapproachable banks” that “admits of no stopping” except at its destination. Rapid transshipment would effectively extend the Chesapeake Bay to the Alleghany Mountains; rather than a true entrepôt, Baltimore would be a stopping point on the way elsewhere. “[C]arrying the Rail-road to tide . . . would operate, as effectually as a boat navigation, to render Baltimore a mere port of transit.” Under this system all the railroad’s traffic would yield only one exchange, between the B&O and its connecting line. This would reduce Baltimore to the status of southern cities that existed only to ship cotton and enrich the planter class. 89 If railroad cars went straight to the docks, they might as well go straight to Philadelphia—in which case, as one writer warned, “We become a mere place of transit.” 90 Proponents of track removal later argued this was precisely what had happened. The Joint Committee on Railroads wrote in 1835 that the tracks had “already in some measure made the City of Baltimore a mere place of transit.” Western goods passing “directly from railway cars to the shipping” carried “little benefit to our people.” 91
It was equally obvious to the railroad company, though, that its function was to facilitate the passage of trade through Baltimore. In the absence of an easy through connection, the company explained, “an onerous and unnecessary tax will be virtually levied on both producer and consumer affected by the Rail Road,” a disadvantage that would ultimately work to the advantage of Baltimore’s urban seaboard competitors. 92 One writer noted that as the object of the rail line was to bring western commodities to port at Baltimore, it made no more sense to stop one mile outside the docks than it did ten miles away—an argument that explicitly dismissed the notion that urban space should be excepted from broader patterns of rail travel. 93 Supporters of urban rails drew on their own water metaphor to explain their political economy, opining that it was foolish to make travel more difficult at a time of great competition with Philadelphia and New York City for the trade of the West, “For trade like water, seeks its conveniences and its level, and will find them.” 94
These competing conceptions of the city collided most forcefully when the B&O announced plans for a joint depot with the Baltimore & Port Deposit (later the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore) on Pratt Street. 95 In early March 1837 the Board of Directors received a memorial from “a large number of Citizens of Baltimore” decrying the joint depot project. 96 These citizens feared that this “arrangement would operate materially to the disadvantage of the inhabitants of Baltimore generally, by making the city a mere place of passage through without stopping,” and recommended instead the location of several depots around the city to “give opportunity to the citizens generally, to reap advantage from your great work of internal improvement.” The company in its response assured the public that the interests of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and its terminal city were “identical, since whatever may advance the prosperity of the city, must greatly contribute to the productiveness of the improvement.” Conversely, policies harmful to the company would be to the disadvantage of the city. 97 Uniting the depots would not make Baltimore a mere place of transit. “The only difference between the two arrangements,” the B&O’s report explained, was “that a passenger arriving here and wishing to continue his journey, will in the one case, have to remove himself and his baggage from one car to the other, and that in the other, the same transit must be made, by means of an omnibus.” They could gain no business by detaining travelers against their will. 98 The threat to their prosperity was rooted in the exertions of cities like New York and Philadelphia, whose internal improvement plans threatened to undermine Baltimore’s advantages. The “true danger” lay “not in the treacherous outlets of our city but in the vigor and activity of our adversaries, and to the defence of this point we must look for safety.” Baltimore’s geographic position suggested that the city could be the central node in a developing nationwide transit system, but this would be sacrificed if citizens intentionally added delays and impediments to free travel. 99
The City Directors, City Council’s representatives on the railroad’s Board of Directors, pressed the company’s case further in their own report by encouraging a broader geographic worldview. They stated that the B&O was “only an important link in the great chain of internal communication between the east and west,” and that the city needed to facilitate connections “to form the most perfect continuity practicable throughout the entire line of communication.” Forcibly separating the depots would impair existing advantages and invite the creation of other competing routes. The City Directors emphasized that Baltimore was part of a larger network and condemned those who opposed the unified depot for their “local views, sectional interests or selfish motives.” 100 The City Council reacted sharply to this statement. Baltimore, a committee of the Council declared, was nothing less than the eastern terminus of the B&O, and the joint depot aimed to subvert that position. A major city had every right to compel travelers to pass through its streets. The Council resolved that their report was “in Direct Opposition to the Judgment of a Great Majority of the Citizens of Baltimore and at variance with the experience of our Merchants and Citizens generally.” 101
Both arguments reflected the power of the railroad to reorient the public imagination of the city and of urban space. Through trade had been at the heart of the B&O’s founding mission, which was, after all, to make Baltimore the clearinghouse for western trade, facilitating shipments between the Ohio River Valley and the Atlantic markets. After only half a decade of operations, though, the railroad had undermined the commercial logic that had prompted its creation, leading Baltimoreans on both sides of these debates to rethink the role of the city in an emerging national market. Rail supporters used the language of scale to trivialize their opposition, claiming that the narrow interests of the aggrieved citizens stood in the way of progress, and that the importance of city streets lay in their ability to connect a national market rather than foster local prosperity. The City Council likewise deployed scalar rhetoric as it countered these views, claiming that the spaces of a major terminal city were categorically distinct from those of “villages” along the line. The City Directors’ support of a national communications network over the privileges of urban space “plac[ed] Baltimore entirely below the rank she deserves” and threatened to reduce the city—in popular imagination and in fact—to “a mere place of passage.” 102 In addition to prompting these articulations of the urban imagination, the debate over the Pratt Street Depot revealed a more immediate shift in power: City Council could authorize the placement of these tracks but could not prevent the B&O from sharing its station with the railroad to Philadelphia. The railroad companies ignored these protests and held their depot in common for the next thirteen years. 103
Conclusion
Observers from cities up and down the eastern seaboard monitored Baltimore’s track debates closely. In New York and Philadelphia, municipal officials and the executives of brand new railroad corporations cited the B&O’s experience as they confronted public doubts about the place of tracks in the urban fabric. The New York & Harlem Railroad, looking to extend its line into the “compact part” of Manhattan in 1832, highlighted “the triumphant success of the rail road introduced into the city of Baltimore” to answer mounting concerns about the safety of urban rails. 104 In Philadelphia, a commission tasked with extending tracks into the urban core corresponded with B&O officials when faced with public opposition. B&O President Philip Thomas responded that a railway could convey goods within the city with “more economy and less interruption to the ordinary intercourse” than any other mode of transit. He added that the opposition to the railroad’s path had been roused by “certain individuals in the two western wards” and was not the result of “any real inconvenience occasioned by obstructions caused from the Rail tracks.” 105
Thomas’s suggestion that there were material interests at stake in the track debates was not unfounded, but he misstated the scope of the opposition and failed to predict its endurance. Petitioning for track removal in Pratt and other streets would continue for the next several decades, as would concerns about the concentration of trade in the hands of the B&O. A round of track removal petitions from 1840, for example, called the tracks “an evil” that funneled all the profit from the western trade to a company monopolizing business “which belongs to draymen, hackmen, and carters.” 106 For railroad companies too, city streets would prove to be an unusually troublesome arena for transportation, even as the novelty of urban railcars wore off. Street traffic exposed rail shipments to the perils of urban congestion and accidents, while track removal campaigns subjected precisely coordinated timetables to the vagaries of local politics. By the 1870s, Baltimore’s railroad companies—this time following precedents set in other cities—built tunnels and belt lines so as to route shipments outside the built portions of the city, effectively removing through traffic from the urban core. 107
A similar dynamic played out in other American cities, as railroad companies and city leaders balanced the benefits of quick delivery to downtown markets against the traffic and safety problems posed by urban tracks. The central questions raised by the railroad about the place of the city in larger communications networks and the balance between neighborhood safety and speedy transit continued into the automobile age. The Interstate Highway System raised familiar concerns, including in Baltimore where projected routes through the urban core were the objects of well-known and partially successful public protests. 108 Studying debates over the path of the railroad through Baltimore in the 1830s highlights the early stages of a conflict that has continued to play out in American cities.
These debates also represent a moment of intellectual disjuncture as the railroad, with its distinctive patterns of movement, forced Baltimoreans to reconsider the meaning of urbanism. Even among the land-owners, politicians, and publishers who constitute the core of what sociologists Harvey Molotch and John Logan have termed the “urban growth machine,” there was no consensus as to how and to what ends the city should function. Imposing the complex operations of a railroad on the crowded urban environment prompted questions about the shape the city was to take. 109 Railroad opposition was animated by concerns over equitable distribution of trade, the safety and openness of the streets, and private monopoly control of public space, seeing the welfare of the city rooted in the collective well-being of its citizens and neighborhoods. Draymen, carters, and their allies envisioned a city in which long- and short-distance travel were sharply divided, privileging urban space as a place of commerce and exchange. For railroad supporters, these priorities were parochial and restrictive. They were concerned not with which Baltimoreans would transport goods locally but whether the goods would start with the B&O or take the Erie Canal; fears about safety in the street paled next to emerging market demands for efficient and speedy transactions. They envisioned the city as a mechanized place of movement, in which the efficiencies of rail travel extended into the urban street.
This was not a conflict between traditionalists and progressives, but rather a clash between two visions of urban modernity. Nearly all Baltimoreans—including the draymen and carters—supported the idea of a railroad from their city to the Ohio River, and accepted at face value its promises of economic revival. They were not luddites—even in a decade that saw multiple instances of popular violence in the face of economic corruption, track removal efforts proceeded through officially sanctioned channels. It remained a civic protest, marked by appeals to the Mayor and City Council rather than sabotage of the iron rails. 110 But the track debates did reflect divergent ideas as to who had the right and the authority to enact changes in public space.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the Lexington Group in Transportation History.