Knox

= The United States Gets Moving: =

Mapping the Expansion of Transportation in the United States from 1800 to 1860
In the year 1800, Americans elected Thomas Jefferson as their third president. Jefferson had a dream. His dream was to discover a waterway that crossed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. He wished to build a system of trade that connected people throughout the country. At the time, the United States did not stretch all the way across the continent.This is what the United States looked like in 1800. As you can see, it was mostly undeveloped since much of it was still claimed by Spain. Travel occurred mostly on dirt paths, trails, and roads. Jefferson proposed that explorers travel across North America to search for such a waterway. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the exploration west from 1803 to 1806. Lewis and Clark discovered that the Rocky Mountains divided the continent. In addition, they were not able to find a coast-to-coast waterway. New ideas were surely going to be necessary. Here is a map that outlines their travels.The early 1800’s signified a time of rapid growth in agriculture and industry.Farmers were shifting from growing just enough to sustain their families (subsistence agriculture) to producing crops for sale (commercial agriculture). These crops needed to be transported for trade.Factories and new technologies were also being developed as industry became prominent. Transportation of goods was going to be the key to success.There were several new modes of transportation on the horizon….turnpikes, roads, canals, steamboats or riverboats, and railroads. The first turnpike, or toll road, was built by private stock companies and financed by private investments and toll revenues. It was called the Lancaster Turnpike, and was opened in 1794 between Lancaster, PA and Philadelphia.The Wilderness Road in Kentucky was a fairly primitive, dirt road and was opened to wagon traffic. It influenced people to settle in the lower Ohio River Valley. It was well-used and was later upgraded to an all-weather road.Two-way river transportation came with the invention of the steamboat, or riverboat. A number of inventors had attempted to use steam engines to power boats, but the most successful design was created by Robert Fulton in 1807 and used on the Clermont. Fulton demonstrated the watercraft on the Hudson River and won a monopoly from the New York legislature to form a steamboat ferrying service between New York and New Jersey.The National Road, a paved highway extending west from Cumberland, Maryland, was paid for and maintained through congressional funds. It was completed as far as Wheeling, WV on the Ohio River in 1818 and then extended over the next twenty years to Vandalia, Illinois. The federal funding of the National Road was unusual. Typically, roads were either the responsibility of local government or were built under charters granted by the states.The National Road was designed to address a problem which was quite serious at the time. The young nation possessed enormous pieces of land to the west, but there was simply no easy way for people to get there. The roads heading westward at the time were primitive, and in most cases were Indian trails or old military trails dating to the French and Indian War. The idea of the national Road was to build a road which would lead from the center of the United States at the time, which was Maryland, westward, to Ohio and beyond. In addition to providing a way for settlers to get to the west, the road was also seen as a boon to business. Farmers and traders could move goods to markets in the east, and the road was therefore seen as necessary to the country’s economy. First came the National Road which ran from Maryland to West Virginia. After the War of 1812, it was suggested that a canal be constructed from Lake Erie to Albany (363 miles) using the Mohawk River and then the Hudson River to connect with New York City. Such a project had no precedent in the United States. Clinton obtained a subsidy from the New York legislature and began construction on July 4, 1817. This was to become the Erie Canal. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was an instant success, bringing prosperity and additional settlement to the west near Buffalo and helping to make New York City the top American seaport. By this time, the Wabash – Erie Canal was also constructed in western Ohio. In addition, canals were extended out throughout Indiana.In 1830, roads were unable to handle bulk traffic, so farmers in Tennessee, Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley could take their harvest to an eastern city such as New York by riding down rivers to New Orleans and then taking a ship around Florida. The Mississippi River became a major means of transporting agricultural products from the Old Northwest to the East Coast, and its free navigation was vital to American interests. The easiest means of river transport were rafts, but they were unstable, and river rapids posed a serious danger. Flatboats could carry more cargo, providing an interior space for the storage of products and supplies. Real improvement, however, came with the keelboat. Its design made it more controllable, and a small crew using poles could propel a keelboat downstream at a fairly rapid rate. As many as one thousand keelboats a year headed down trans-Appalachian tributaries and rivers to New Orleans. Unfortunately, rafts, flatboats, and keelboats had one major disadvantage—they could make only a one-way trip.The Michigan Road, which resulted from the 1826 treaty with the Potawatomi Indians, was the first major road in the state, targeted to run from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River. Surveying began in 1830, contracting in 1832, and the road was cleared by 1836. The Michigan Road became a major thoroughfare for passengers and hog drives.By this time, railroads were rapidly growing. They could be constructed at about half the cost of a canal, carry the same amount of freight at two times the speed, and could operate in all seasons. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was chartered in 1828 and had thirteen miles of track operation by May, 1830.Charleston, South Carolina, built the second railroad in the nation by 1833, which totaled some 136 miles. To the north, three short lines operated out of Boston by the early 1830s. During the same decade, roughly three miles of rails were built for every two miles of canal, resulting in the relative parity of both rail and canal systems by 1840.Steamboats made river ports important commercial points for entire regions; canals had a similar impact in the Northeast and the Midwest, particularly near the Great Lakes.Miami-Erie Canal built in the western part of Ohio, from Cincinnati to Dayton in 1832, and to Toledo in 1845.Philadelphia merchants, jealous of New York's success, pressed for a canal between eastern Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, but this waterway presented even greater obstacles than the New York project. The 395-mile Pennsylvania Canal required 174 locks—more than double the number on the Erie Canal—and a funicular railway (incline), called the Allegheny Portage Railroad to get cargo over the Allegheny Mountains. Completed in 1834, it carried considerable traffic but never rivaled the Erie Canal in terms of total tonnage or economic impact.The Allegheny Portage Railroad was the first railroad constructed through the Allegheny Mountains in central Pennsylvania, United States. It was a series of 10 inclines, approximately 36 miles (58 km) long. It connected two canal divisions of the Main Line of Public Works of the Pennsylvania Canal from Johnstown on the west to Hollidaysburg on the east. Considered a technological marvel in its day, it played a critical role in opening the interior of the United States beyond the Appalachian Mountains to settlement and commerce. It included the first railroad tunnel in the United States, the Staple Bend Tunnel, and its inauguration was marked with great celebration. In 1850, the number of miles of rails exceeded total canal miles by nearly two times.According to the "Mammoth Improvements Bill", the state proposed a Madison-to-Lafayette railroad; that same year, the Lawrenceburg-Indianapolis railroad was chartered (horse drawn carriages on rails). However, the first true railroad, which ran from Madison to Indianapolis, was not operational until 1847. By 1860, more than thirty thousand miles of railroad track had been laid throughout many parts of the US. Originally concentrated in the Northeast, by the time of the Civil War, lines reached as far west as St. Joseph, Missouri.Thomas Jefferson was right. Transportation became a major key to the economic success of the young United States. Because of the implementation of Jefferson’s dream of travel and trade, the United States became a flourishing and thriving success story.