[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 a couple examples of the benefits of staying open to new AmericanStudying.
I have to start this post with some blog inside baseball: I had originally planned for a different final weekday post in the series, on a topic (the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby) that I have now shifted to be part of the weekend post instead. What changed my tune was a fortuitous find in a very beautiful place—Vaughn and I were visiting family and friends in her home state of Pennsylvania over the summer, right at the same time that I was drafting the posts in this series (told you this would be some blog inside baseball), and we found ourselves in the historic small town of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk, but renamed for Thorpe after the legendary athlete and inspiring American was buried and memorialized there in the 1950s). And at the heart, literally as well as figuratively, of that lovely small town in the Poconos mountains is a historic and still running train and railroad line, the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway.
One reason I was especially excited for this unexpected encounter and knew that I wanted to turn it into a post in this series was the unique yet telling histories that the town and railroad alike feature. Quoting from a placard with the same title that I’ve given this post: “Throughout the nineteenth century, Mauch Chunk (present-day Jim Thorpe) served as a transportation hub for the transport of coal and other commodities. The region’s landscape presented transportation challenges with its steep slopes and the Lehigh River Gorge. The Lehigh Canal and two railroad companies [ME: The Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad] conquered the terrain and capitalized on the region’s coal.” I love how those specific factors in this particular place nonetheless echo the origins of the historic railroad the anniversary of which provided the impetus for my blog series, and also can be connected to the 200th anniversary of the Erie Canal about which I’ve blogged on multiple occasions over the last year. Seeing the world through an AmericanStudier lens opens up so much about our histories and stories, and I’ll keep doing my best to find and share those connections in this space.
And if I may quote the one and only Neil McCauley for a second time this year, there’s a flip side to that coin. If visiting Jim Thorpe helped me reframe this week’s blog series, the blog series in progress (at that time) likewise helped make my visit to the town into something distinct from, and I would argue even more meaningful than, what it otherwise would have been. More exactly, having this week’s series on my mind allowed me to see the aforementioned Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway as more than just a tourist attraction (although it is that, and seemingly a quite successful one although we unfortunately didn’t have time to take a ride ourselves). It helped me to think about the question of where and how we can commemorate our historic railroads, and of how when we do so such spaces become living history museums, not at all unlike others I’ve featured on this blog including Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg. This is a brand-new (to me) idea and so one I haven’t yet thought through with the nuance it no doubt requires, but I very much like seeing a historical railway like Jim Thorpe’s through this lens, and did so precisely because of this blog and its ongoing effects on my AmericanStudying.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Rail histories or contexts you’d share?
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