[On October 7, 1826, America’s first commercial railroad, the Massachusetts Granite Railway, began operations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that line and other important moments in the history of American commercial rail and its contexts, leading up to a weekend post on pop culture representations!]
On three figures who together help us remember that first commercial railroad.
- Gridley Bryant: There are multiple figures whom we could focus on to frame the starting points for the Granite Railway, including Solomon Willard (the designer and architect of Boston’s Bunker Hill Monument who selected Quincy’s quarry as the source of its stone) and Thomas Handasyd Perkins (the state legislator who organized and directed the Granite Railway Company). But the individual most responsible for that railway’s existence and success was the groundbreaking civil and construction engineer Gridley Bryant (1789-1867), who received the charter from Perkins in March 1826, began construction on the railway in April, and oversaw its October launch as well as its next few decades of operation. In an 1859 letter, Bryant described the opposition the project initially faced: “The questions were asked: ‘What do we know about rail-roads? Who ever heard of such a thing? Is it right to take people’s land for a project that no one knows anything about? We have corporations enough already.’ Such and similar objections were made, and onerous restrictions were imposed, but it finally passed by a small majority only.” But pass it did, and this innovative transportation and technological marvel moved forward.
- Fanny Kemble: Already a famous English actress, Kemble (1809-1893) would gain significantly more notoriety when she married the Philadelphia businessman Pierce Mease Butler in 1834, moved with him to Georgia when he inherited his family’s slave plantation there, and documented her growing antipathy toward slavery in a journal that she would later publish as Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863). But that wasn’t Kemble’s first famous writing about the United States: a longtime train aficionado (she had attended the opening of George Stephenson’s Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830 and wrote glowingly about the experience), while on an early 1830s theatrical tour of the U.S. she had the chance to visit Quincy and observe the operations of the Granite Railway. I haven’t been able to find the specific text of Kemble’s documentation of that visit in her journal, but just the fact that this famous tourist and train lover made and documented the trip illustrates how, in less than a decade, the Granite Railway had become an international sensation.
- Thomas Achuas: Commercial trains can be plenty dangerous of course, as I’ll discuss in a later post in this series on famous accidents. But ironically enough, it was another tourist visitor to the Granite Railway who would become the first person killed in a commercial railroad accident. As described in that hyperlinked post above, Achuas was a visitor from Cuba who was taking a tourist ride on the Railway with three American friends on July 25, 1832. A cable broke and their car derailed, falling more than 30 feet (the Railway was designed to ascend the quarry’s steep walls); Achuas was killed and the three others badly injured. This first American railroad tragedy is of course a tragedy, full stop; but it’s also an inevitable and significant milestone in the development of not only this specific railway, but the entire new technology and industry.
Next train! tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rail histories or contexts you’d share?
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