In 1829, a little-noticed event that would soon drastically alter the future transportation of people and commodities took place. Horatio Allen, an engineer, arranged to have four steam locomotives built in England for use by the Carbondale and Honesdale Railroad in Pennsylvania, On 8 August 1829, with Allen at the controls and a crowd watching, the Stourbridge Lion locomotive made its trial run at ten miles an hour down the rails, over a trestle one hundred feet high, and around a curve. This event is described by Rupert Sargent Holland in his book Historic Railroads (1927, 134-35). From this humble but successful beginning, other charters to build railroads were granted, and construction began. In 1830 there were only twenty-three miles of railroad in operation. On 15 January 1831, the first passenger train in the United States that was pulled by a locomotive made a run between Charleston and Hamburg, South Carolina. By 1836 there were 1,098 miles of railroad, most of which were in the seacoast states. Mileage was 9,021 in 1850, 30,055 by 1860, 52,922 by 1870, and 74,096 by 1875 (Encyclopedia Americana 1956, 410). The extensive railroad system in the North played an important part in the Union’s winning the Civil War because it aided greatly in the transport of troops and equipment to and from the battlefields.

Most early railroads were individual segments that were not joined. They connected waterways, the seacoast, and the interior river system. By the late 1830s new technology had improved the steam engine and lowered the cost of building railroads. Because railroads could be built over rough terrain, they joined different market areas that were not dependent on waterways. By 1841 a railroad ran between Boston and Albany. High priority was given to building railroads from east to west, and by 1842 Albany was connected by rail to Buffalo. A line running through southern New York connected Pierpont on the Hudson to Lake Erie in 1851. Also in 1851, Albany and New York were connected by rail, making it possible to travel from New York by way of Albany to Lake Erie. Other lines ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (1852) and Baltimore and Wheeling (1853) (Billington and Ridge 1982, 341). Transportation by rail was cheaper and more efficient than by canal barges or steamboats. Because canals could not compete economically with the flourishing railroads, the canal era came to a close.

As railroads extended farther west, pioneers traveled by trains to the newly opened lands. In 1856 a line was opened between Chicago and the Mississippi River. In the same year the Illinois Central completed a line from Galena down through the center of the state to Cairo and a branch line from Centralia to Chicago. The total distance was 705 miles; it was the longest railroad in the United States at the time. An average of seven thousand and sometimes as many as ten thousand German immigrants were employed in its construction (Holbrook 1947, 103).

Railroads preceded the settlement of the country in the west. They linked isolated cities and towns and brought about the establishment of new towns. Industries appeared along the routes and pioneers settled on neighboring lands. On 10 May 1869 the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads joined at Promontory Summit, Utah, forming the first transcontinental railroad.

Key Sources-- Railroad Maps

• Billington, Ray Allen and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 5th ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982. Small maps show early western transportation routes, including railroads.
• Cram’s Standard American Railway System Atlas of the World: Accompanied by a Complete and Simple Index of the United States Showing the True Location of All Railroads, Towns, Villages and Post Offices. . . . Chicago: George F. Cram, 1895 (FHL microfilm no. 1421836, item 2.
• The Handy Book for Genealogists: United States of America. 8th ed. Logan, Utah: Everton Publishers, 1991. A map shows railroads built by 1860.
• McLaughlin, Patrick D., comp. Transportation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Survey of the Cartographic Records in the National Archives of the United States. Reference Information Paper no. 65. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Service, 1973. The development of the transportation network in nineteenth-century America is documented in this survey of nine series of maps.
• Modelski, Andrew M., comp. Railroad Maps of North America: The First Hundred Years. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984. This book traces the history of railroad mapping and includes ninety-two maps.
• Railroad Maps of the United States: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of Original 19th-Century Maps in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1975 (FHL microfilm no. 1033024, item 6). This book includes thorough descriptions of 622 railroad maps chosen from the several thousand in the library’s collection. It includes maps of five major geographical regions, maps of states (at least one for each state), and maps of individual railroads.
• See “Nineteenth-Century Maps--American History Atlases,” [later in this chapter of ‘Printed Sources.’]
  

Reference List

Billington, Ray Allen and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 5th ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982.

Drago, Harry Sinclair. 1972. Canal Days in America: The History and Romance of Old Towpaths and Waters. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Distributed by Crown Publishers.

‘The Encylopedia Americana.’ United States -- Domestic Trade and Commerce. New York: Americana Corp., 1956.

Greenhood, David. 1964. Mapping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

Holbrook, Stewart H. 1947. The Story of American Railroads. New York: Crown Publishers.

Makower, Joel, ed. 1992. The Map Catalog: Every Kind of Map and Chart on Earth and Even Some Above It. 3rd ed. Newly rev. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House.

Mason, Philip P. 1967. A History of American Roads. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co.

Schweitzer, George K. 1996. Civil War Genealogy. Knoxville, Tenn.: the author.

Stephenson, Richard W., comp. 1967. Land Ownership Maps: A Checklist of Nineteenth Century United States County Maps in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress.

Thompson, Morris M. 1987. Maps for North America: Cartographic Products of the U.S. Geological Survey and Others. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey.

The above is an excerpt from Printed Sources: A Guide to Published Genealogical Records, edited by Kory L. Meyerink (Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Inc., 1998.), Chapter 3: Geographic Tools: Maps, Atlases and Gazetteers, by Carol Mehr Schiffman. (http://www.ancestry.com/rd/prodredir.asp?sourceid=20623&key=P1023)

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