USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 38
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CANAL PROJECTS (1652-1859)
Minor canals were commenced in 1652 by the town of Ipswich in connection with a local stream, and Samuel Sewall in his diary in 1686 recorded the proposal of a Mr. Smith of Sandwich respecting a cut through Cape Cod at the head of
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pointed an engineer to investigate the possibilities in 1776; but he went into the service of the Continental Army instead, and the investigation was postponed from time to time until about a hundred years later.
Meanwhile surveys were made in 1791 for canals to ex- tend westward from Boston. In 1793 a canal had been undertaken to avoid Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimac; and about the same time similar works were commenced near Turner's Falls and South Hadley on the Connecticut. The Middlesex Canal was originally projected to open up the lakes of New Hampshire and the western interior of New England to navigation by the Merrimac River. Its first sec- tion was opened in 1804, and large sums were expended over a period of years in maintenance and improvement. An an- nual income of $36,000 was considered requisite to the pay- ment of a fair dividend, but receipts long fell below that sum.
The Middlesex Canal was considered the finest structure of its kind until the Erie Canal was built. On it horses were able to haul boats carrying 14 tons at 3 miles an hour, at a cost for the entire 27 miles of the journey amounting to $1.70 for toll charges and $1.80 for freighting. "The traf- fic, which was mostly freight," says Vose, "was carried in flat-bottomed boats, with a rectangular midship section reduced a little toward the ends. By the regulations of the canal, boats were required to be not less than 40 feet nor more than 75 feet long, and not less than 9 feet nor more than 91/2 feet wide. Each boat was drawn by one horse, the towing line being attached to a short mast, which was placed a little ahead of the center. The crew consisted of one man to drive and one to steer, except in the case of boats running up the Mer- rimac River, which had one man to steer and two to pole. These boats carried from 16 to 30 tons, and drew about 21/2 feet when loaded. Freight boats were required to make 21/2 miles an hour, and passenger boats 4 miles."
Cargoes consisted principally of products of the northern New England woodland-fuel, timber, lumber, pot and pearl ashes, together with some farm products and building stone. That the canal was regarded as a substantial convenience is
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evidenced by the increase in value of the adjacent lands by about a third over what they were worth prior to its construc- tion, and accessible woodlands in New Hampshire were said by Daniel Webster to have increased five million dollars in value. Up to the time of the opening of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, the canal had been paying annual dividends of $10 to $30 a share for some years; but this new competition and the subsequent building of the Nashua and Lowell line re- duced traffic to the point where it did not meet the expenses of operation, and in 1859 its charter was surrendered. Origi- nal shareholders approximately got their money back. A minor project was the half-mile canal, completed in 1821, from Fox Creek to the Chebacco River, connecting Ipswich and Essex. It returned a good profit on the investment of about $1,100.
The Blackstone Canal was completed from Providence to the Rhode Island line in 1824, and in the course of another four years the first boat moved through it from Providence to Worcester. Its life was short, however, for in 1844 the canal was sold out to the Providence and Worcester Rail- road, which was constructed along the same route.
In 1825 there was considerable agitation for a canal from Boston to the Connecticut River, and over a period of years various routes were discussed. One of them was surveyed from Boston to Meriden on the Blackstone Canal, and thence to the Connecticut Valley, by a roundabout route which made the distance from Boston to Worcester about 26 miles more than it was by highway.
A resolution of the legislature on Febuary 25, 1825, created a commission "to ascertain the practicability of making a canal from Boston to the Connecticut River and extending the same to some point on the Hudson River in the State of New York in the vicinity of the junction of the Erie Canal with that river." The problem of canal construction west of the Connecticut River stumped every engineer who tackled it. There was a feeling that some cheap form of transportation must be provided for the farmers of western Massachusetts, and there was a strong conviction on the part of the merchants
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Woodford
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White House
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Brown's Mills
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Haystack Creek
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Courtesy of Harvard College Library
A PART OF COL. LOAMMI BALDWIN'S CANAL SURVEY, WHICH FIRST PROPOSED THE HOOSAC TUNNEL
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RAILROAD VERSUS CANAL
of Boston that it was very wrong for the traffic of the West to be going down the Hudson and the Connecticut to New York when it would be so much more profitable to have it pass through Boston.
A number of surveys were made, the desperateness of the project being attested by Colonel Loammi Baldwin's plan, which proposed a tunnel through Hoosac Mountain about where the present tunnel of the Boston and Maine runs. The fact was that western Massachusetts would not lend itself to canalization, and that in an industrial community, the canal as a device for transportation could not possibly compete with the railroad, once the latter had become a practical device.
RAILROAD VERSUS CANAL (1825-1841)
Nathan Hale, editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, in 1827 argued the substantial advantages of a railway over the proposed canal to the Connecticut. He mentioned the saving in time in the transportation of freight, and the great importance of something faster than a canal if passengers were to be attracted. He also suggested that, inasmuch as the great bulk of country produce requires to be transported in the winter, the railroad would be very much better than the canal, which was likely to be used principally for skating throughout five months of the year.
All of this was written on the assumption that horses would be the motive power on the railway. The writer suggested that steam engines gave promise but were not yet to be counted upon. His description of the type of road, since it is essentially typical of the first construction, is perhaps worth reproducing : "The railroad which we propose, is a substantial and durable road, furnished with a single pair of wrought iron rails, similar to those of the most approved construction used in England, placed on stone supporters, and at the same dis- tances from each other, with the wheels of a common car- riage,-the path between the rails to be gravelled,-and at intervals of about every quarter of a mile, turn-out places should be provided, consisting of a pair of rails diverging from the main path to a sufficient distance to permit one line
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of carriages to pass another, and returning again to it. The moving power to be a single horse, the whole line of the road to be made so near a level as to admit of being travelled rapidly in both directions,-and where a greater declivity is indis- pensable, an additional power to be provided, to raise, or ease down the load."
Hale, incidentally, must be given credit for being the first to propose a device which it has been left for the twentieth century to adopt in principle. Commenting upon the objec- tion that the railway carriages could not be brought to the warehouse door, as a common wagon might be, he suggested that a kind of iron shoe might be fitted over the wheel so as to protect its flange, and that it might then be hauled by horses like an ordinary wagon to any part of the town. On such a line as he proposed he estimated that freight could be hauled at the rate of 36 miles a day, requiring something under three days from Boston to the Connecticut River, at a total cost, excluding tolls, of $1.50 a ton.
FIRST RAILROAD CONSTRUCTION (1826-1828)
The first railway constructed in Massachusetts ran from the Bunker Hill quarry in Quincy to the ocean shore in Milton, and was intended to carry the granite blocks that were quar- ried there for the monument at Bunker Hill. It was not a railroad in the modern sense of the word but merely a tram- way on which haulage was made easier. The loaded cars were lowered down a steep incline near the quarry by a rope attached to a stationary steam engine, and were then hauled by horses to the water's edge, where the stones were removed to barges for transport to Charlestown. The road was most substantially constructed by laying a kind of granite founda- tion, upon which wooden rails of pine, 6 inches by 12 inches, supporting an oak strip, 2 inches by 3 inches, were sur- mounted by iron plates 3/8 of an inch thick and 21/2 inches wide. Cars with wheels six feet in diameter were used to carry blocks of granite weighing eight or nine tons. A simple snowplow attached to the front of the car served to keep the line open in winter.
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RAILWAY SYSTEM
GENESIS OF THE RAILWAY SYSTEMS (1828-1841)
The success of railways in New England and the urgent demand for transportation in Massachusetts caused the legis- lature, in January, 1827, to undertake an investigation of the best railroad route from Boston to the Hudson River. The route chosen for estimates was substantially that of the pres- ent Boston and Albany Railroad, and the proposal was to construct a line in very much the same substantial manner as the quarry road at Quincy.
A good deal of guesswork was involved in the estimates of operating cost, a sample of which is appended: "The cost of transportation is reckoned in the following manner: Two horses being able to haul 20 tons on a level, and also on grades not exceeding 26 feet per mile, with additional horses for steeper inclines, and going at 3 miles per hour, would make the trip from Boston to Albany in 4 days, the distance being divided into 10 stages of 20 miles each. We have then:
20 horses at 50¢ a day each $10.00
8 horses extra for steep grades 4.00
1 man 4 days, at $1 a day 4.00
6 wagons at 75¢ each a day [sic] 3.00
$21.00
"To the above there is added for profit to the carrier, and the hazard of going sometimes partly loaded, fifty per cent, making the total cost for 16 net tons $31.50 or $1.97 per net ton."
A line was also projected to Providence; and presently charters began to issue from the legislature. The Boston and Lowell was the first to be incorporated, and was followed in 1831 by the Boston and Providence and a line to Worcester. All three were open to traffic in 1835, comprising about 111 miles of trackage at a time when the railroads of the United States totalled 1,098 miles.
Probably the most substantial of these was the Boston and Lowell, which its directors declared had been built from solid
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granite as an assurance that it would never wear out. Un- fortunately, the unyielding firmness of the road was a little too much for the rolling stock, which rapidly pounded itself to pieces, thus proving that there was some valuable truth for the railroads in the cockney coachman's aphorism that "hit ain't the 'eavy 'aulin' as 'urts the 'osses' 'oofs; hit's the 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer on the 'ard 'ighway."
THE NEW EXPERIENCE OF TRAVEL (1835-1841)
Newspapers of the day are full of the glorious records of the trial runs on which the invited passengers were regaled by the "sweetness of the atmosphere," and the "beauty and novelty of the scenery which was successively presented to view," so magnificent that it "appeared to produce in all . . . an agreeable exhilaration of spirits." Unfortunately, a party who went out from Boston on November 15, to cele- brate completion of the road as far as Westboro, was delayed by head winds and the day's pleasure was somewhat curtailed. On the occasion of the opening of the line to Providence the new locomotive was not in very good order, so the initial trip was made with horse power, which gave an excellent opportunity to inspect the "grand structure."
With all of the flag waving and celebration that accom- panied these very considerable exploits in a very important field, all was not wholly rosy. There is at least one record of a trip at about this time from Boston to New York which conveys another impression and seems entitled to recognition : "July 22, 1835 .- This morning at nine o'clock I took pas- sage in a railroad car [from Boston] for Providence. Five or six other cars were attached to the locomotive, and uglier boxes I do not wish to travel in. They were made to stow away some thirty human beings, who sit cheek by jowl as best they can. Two poor fellows, who were not much in the habit of making their toilet, squeezed me into a corner, while the hot sun drew from their garments a villainous compound of smells made up of salt fish, tar and molasses. By and by, just twelve,-only twelve,-bouncing factory girls were in- troduced, who were going on a party of pleasure to Newport.
From Bostonian Society Publications
LOCK GATES AT NORTH BILLERICA
Courtesy of Boston & Maine Railroad
FIRST TRAIN ON THE BOSTON AND LOWELL RAILROAD, 1835
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'Make room for the ladies!' bawled out the superintendent. 'Come, gentlemen, jump up on the top; plenty of room there.' 'I'm afraid of the bridge knocking my brains out,' said a passenger. Some made one excuse and some another. For my part, I flatly told him that since I had belonged to the corps of Silver Grays I had lost my gallantry, and did not intend to move. The whole twelve were, however, intro- duced, and soon made themselves at home, sucking lemons and eating green apples. . . . The rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, the polite and the vulgar, all herd together in this modern improvement in travelling. The consequence is a complete amalgamation. Master and servant sleep heads and points on the cabin floor of the steamer, feed at the same table, sit in each other's laps, as it were, in the cars; and all this for the sake of doing very uncomfortably in two days what would be done delightfully in eight or ten. Shall we be much longer kept by this toilsome fashion of hurrying, hurrying, from starting (those who can afford it) on a journey with our own horses, and moving slowly, surely and profitably through the country, with the power of enjoying its beauty and be the means of creating good inns? Un- doubtedly, a line of post-horses and post-chaises would long ago have been established along our great roads had not steam monopolized everything.
In 1841 the long persisting demand for a line to the Hudson was met by the completion of the Western Railroad from Worcester to Albany. It had required seven years to build, and but for the assistance of the State treasury would prob- ably have been longer delayed. With the opening of this line, as Adams says, "the genesis of the system was complete."
TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM ELABORATED (1840-1860)
On this fundamental basis the network of Massachusetts and New England railroads was extended. Two companies were merged in 1845 into the corporation which bought the Blackstone Canal and constructed a road from Worcester to Providence, and other lines were built running from Worcester to Norwich (1840) and from Worcester to Nashua (1848).
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The Western Railroad eventuated as a through line from Boston to Albany by way of Worcester and Springfield, and was the first line to show a tendency toward modern construc- tion by its avoidance of grade crossings, its adoption of heavier rails and the more careful building of its roadbed. All of these lines were in large part financed by capital from Boston and from the communities that were served by the better transportation.
A number of branch roads were constructed from the West- ern Railroad: one from Pittsfield to North Adams, and another from Pittsfield to Stockbridge. A line was completed from Troy to North Adams in 1855.
Springfield became the center of lines running into northern New England and into Connecticut. The first was that con- necting Springfield and Northampton (1845), continued to South Vernon, Vermont (1848) ; and a branch was built to Chicopee Falls (1845).
The Eastern Railroad finished the construction of a line from Boston to Salem in 1838, and reached the New Hamp- shire border in 1840. Another of its lines made connection with Portsmouth, Portland, and Saco in 1846.
The Boston and Fitchburg line ran its first train in 1845 from West Cambridge to Fitchburg, and in 1848 was extended into Boston. It made connection with a number of subsidiary lines, largely in New Hampshire and Vermont, and eventually achieved connection with Brattleboro. Still another branch extended from Fitchburg to Greenfield in 1850.
From this time on it was a question of consolidation and expansion, with the attendant adandonment of some of the shorter lines which had been built in the throes of excess enthusiasm. It is amazing to note that just within the period covered by this volume one may observe the very inception of the railroad in New England and follow it down to the report of Augustus W. Locke and other engineers on the matter of the abolition of grade crossings, which was furnished under instructions of the Massachusetts legislature in 1889. The railroad network as shown on the end-papers of this volume is based on the map accompanying that report.
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SPECIAL BUSINESS FACILITIES
A supplementary service was performed by the introduc- tion, in the late eighties, of electric trolley lines which replaced horse cars on local runs and added rapid interurban trans- portation for passengers and light freight.
SPECIAL FACILITIES FOR BUSINESS (1850-1889)
With all the railroads that were constructed, it was not possible to piece together a through service to Albany and the West, to northern New England, or to New York and beyond, simply because the vast number of independent carriers who controlled short distances tremendously complicated the busi- ness of getting freight transferred. A passenger might be willing to stand the inconvenience because he was still getting something vastly better than he had ever known before; but a business man who wished to forward freight was under the necessity of sending a chaperone with it to supervise its labo- rious transfer and arrange for its reshipment from point to point.
Before 1860, forwarding agencies had grown up which undertook to look after this matter, and it was not many years later that the railroads began to make agreements for the exchange of their freight-car equipment. An express service also grew up, originated by William Harnden of Boston in 1839, and this supplanted the previous custom of utilizing stage drivers, steamboat captains, and other travellers.
The question of transportation by water is discussed in the chapter on clipper ships in this volume.
PROGRESS OF COMMERCE (1820-1889)
The flow of commerce is the natural result of the union of manufactures and transportation facilities. At the begin- ning of the nineteenth century the peddler was the only contact between the manufacturers of New England and their custom- ers in the interior. There were successive steps in peddling, marked first by a man with a pack on his back, later by a man on horseback with his goods packed in baskets, and still later by men whose increasingly elaborate wagons were almost stores on wheels. Then, as transportation facilities became
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better and it was possible to convey large shipments of goods to the interior, and as at the same time interior towns grew up and evidenced a desire for goods of a variety and quality which they could not produce for themselves, it became pos- sible to stock stores and to operate them profitably. So far as the large-scale manufactures of New England were con- cerned-her textiles and shoes and iron specialties-they were largely sold through agents or commission merchants. In the first three or four decades of the century large quanti- ties of cotton and woolen goods were sold at the semiannual market in Boston, which was organized under the auspices of the New England Society for Encouraging Manufactures. In the March sale of 1832, cotton and woolen goods worth $1,500,000 were sold, together with shoes valued at $125,000. At about the same time the woolen market became definitely settled in Boston, and manufacturers who desired to purchase raw materials in quantity attended from places as far west as Ohio.
The railroads developed a traffic in grain products from the West. In 1844 the Western Railroad brought 300,000 barrels of flour to New England, and carried westward New England manufactures which were destined to the cities of the Central States.
PROFITS AND CRISES (1815-1889)
The textile industry, long recognized as among the most staple in New England, averaged earnings of 10 per cent a year on a capital amounting to more than $20,000,000 during the period 1838-1849. The Merrimac Company earned the highest rate, 14 per cent. In 1853, 36 out of 40 New Eng- land corporations paid dividends of 4 to 10 per cent, but in 1856 only 30 out of 41 companies were paying. Even pros- perous companies were working on a basis pretty close to 6 per cent during the years just preceding the Civil War.
We have mentioned the effect of that war in discouraging the cotton manufacturers, many of whom closed their plants, sold them, or sought to enter the woolen business. There was very naturally an overproduction of the more easily manu-
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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
factured types of woolen goods; and when the war ended, losses were considerable. The shoe business, too, prospered as such things do under war-time conditions; but a number of the principal contractors were much handicapped by the cancellation of government orders, which left them with large stocks of goods which it was difficult to sell.
The attitude toward the tariff after the Civil War, as after the War of 1812, was essentially in favor of protective duties on goods which might enter into competition with the products of Massachusetts manufacturers, although there was a feeling that it was a little unfair to impose duties on raw materials which were needed here. In general, there was a gradual increase in duties to 1824, a period of high production until 1832, and a reduction of the tariff following the Compromise of 1833. Then, with the agitation attending the preliminaries of the Civil War, little attention was paid to this particular subject, and duties were imposed with the idea of revenue primarily in view.
More or less associated with the ideas of Massachusetts men on the tariff were the financial crises of 1815-1820, 1837-1840, and 1857-1860. The first of these marked the sufferings of war-time speculators when the sudden conclu- sion of the War of 1812 permitted an inflow of British goods, much more attractive to customers than the war-time product of ill-equipped American manufacturers. The depression of 1837 reflected excessive use of credits by American importers of English goods, who overreached themselves, and so flooded the market that sales of American goods fell off. Manufac- turing companies found it difficult to meet their obligations, and many of them failed. The industrial depression of 1857 is described as a reaction from a period of undue prosperity and consequent unwise extension of manufacturing facilities.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS, JR ..- Railroads: Their Origin and Problems (New York, Putnam's, 1878)-Good account of causative factors and economic aspects.
ARMROYD, GEORGE .- A Connected View of the Whole Internal Navigation of the United States (Privately printed, Phila., 1830)-Covers canals and navigable rivers.
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BAIRD, SPENCER FULLERTON .- "Sea Fisheries of Eastern North America (UNITED STATES : COMMISSION OF FISH AND FISHERIES, Report of the Commissioner for 1886, Washington, D. C., 1889)-See pp. 3-224. Also published separately.
BOLLES, ALBERT SIDNEY .- The Industrial History of the United States, from the Earliest Settlements to the Present Time (Norwich, Conn., Bill, 1889)-Less complete than J. Leander Bishop's work which is the standard for that period.
CLARK, VICTOR S .- History of Manufacturers in the United States 1607- 1860 (Washington, D. C., Carnegie Institution, 1916)-Elaborately documented ; splendid bibliographical data.
COLE, ARTHUR HARRISON .- The American Wool Manufacture, Vol. I (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1926)-Treats both technical development and economic growth of the industry.
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