[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 how the transcontinental railroad changed industries, communities, and the nation.
Much of the framing of the completion and effects of the transcontinental railroad has tended to focus on passenger travel, which was indeed revolutionized after that transformative 1869 moment. But just as American railroads in general had been at least as influential in the commercial and industrial sectors over their first half-century, so too did the transcontinental railroad greatly affect and fundamentally alter American industry. As that hyperlinked article traces, the logging industry was a particularly clear case in point, as railroads could both bring workers to distant or remote logging sites far more easily and carry out the products of their work far more smoothly and quickly. Much is rightly made of the clearing of Western land in order to build the railroads, but it’s just as much the case that the arrival of the railroads accelerated that process immeasurably. (To be clear, that’s far from a good thing, but it’s one with which we have to grapple if we’re analyzing railroad histories.)
That continuing and accelerating process of clearing land also meant that new communities could spring up far more readily along the railroad lines. Once again to be clear, this time without the parentheses as this is a central and crucial point, there were countless existing communities in those spaces, most of them indigenous or Mexican American or both, and they were frequently if not constantly displaced by this process. Those human and too often horrific histories are the most important ones to consider, but there are always multiple layers to any historical changes, and it’s fair to say that the rise of these new railroad-tied communities also had profound commercial and industrial effects. One that I learned a lot about as I researched Denis Kearney for the first season of my podcast is the interconnected transportation industry in which Kearney made his fortune in post-transcontinental railroad San Francisco. Known as drayage, this industry involved the movement of goods between other transportation hubs including ports and railroad depots; like most late 19th century industries it was not new, but was at the same time revolutionized in each and every one of these railroad-affected communities.
Everything I’ve highlighted in this post so far was of course a significant national change as well. But among the many other ways that the nation was likewise affected by the completion of the transcontinental railroad, I would in the context of this week’s series highlight one in particular: the resulting interconnections between industries around the country and beyond. As anyone familiar with the 17th and 18th century triangle trade knows well, such interconnections were once again not new in this period—but were nonetheless, like everything I’ve written about in this post, significantly affected and amplified by the ongoing expansion of railroads. As this Union Pacific Railroad Museum article notes, the first freight transported East on the completed railroad was a load of tea from Japan, reflecting just how widely those commercial connections could range. But even if we limit our scope within the United States, Western agricultural products could make their way to Eastern homes and businesses in both ways and quantities that had never been possible before, building on the granite railway’s very first effects but amplifying them a millionfold.
Next train! tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rail histories or contexts you’d share?
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