How Did Canals and Railroads Change Travel?

Canals changed how people traveled and settled in Illinois. In many places it replaced the stage coach which was the first form of public transport between towns. The canal system in early American travel was a faster and more efficient way to carry people from place to place.

As the mail was the impetus behind the expansion of the stage routes, agriculture and mining were the economic engine behind the creation of canals. Many rivers in the East were navigable only for a short distance before the rising land created water falls which made natural blockades. Early canals were built to create a path around these obstacles. Almost all were private ventures with many canal stocks. They could be highly risky at best, and some were outright schemes to swindle people. The most famous of all, the Erie Canal was no exception. It was the biggest and most successful and also most contentious and expensive. It was an on-again, off-again project whose idea had been touted since before the Revolution. De Witt Clinton and President Martin Van Buren are the names most famously associated with its construction. Building was begun in 1817 on a canal expected to be 365 miles long and accommodate an altitude change of 555 feet. It was finally completed and declared open on October 26, 1825, linking the east coast and Lake Erie. It was called the Wedding of the Waters.

Farmers in particular were burdened by having their farmlands bisected by a canal. In order to pacify them, bridges were built – many bridges. Bridges were called ‘occupation bridges’ to allow farmers access to their fields. But in a fit of economy on the monstrously expensive Erie canal, New York state did not build them very high above the water. This is the origin of the captain’s cry, “Low Bridge, Everybody down!” A person standing on the deck of a packet had to stoop, and those sitting on chairs on top of the roof had to lie flat or risk literal decapitation.

Statistics from 1825 show that the canal was profitable. The tolls collected amounted to $495,000, which more than paid the interest on its debt; 13,110 boats and rafts passed on the canal near  Albany and that 40,000 persons had passed Utica on freight and packet boats during the season; a daily average of forty-two boats, arks and cribs. Its success inspired many other shorter canals to be built, but the railroad was waiting in the wings. In 1826 New York chartered the Mohawk and Hudson railroad to run between Albany and Schenectady.

In 1848, after twelve years of start-and-stop construction and financial troubles, the Illinois and Michigan canal connected Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and allowed travel by all water routes from the east coast to Quincy and other towns in western Illinois. Freight could now be shipped from St. Louis to New York in twelve days. This canal meant that Chicago became the fastest growing city in the country.

In 1836 a traveler, Thomas S. Woodcock wrote, “…boats are about 70 feet long, and with the exception of the kitchen and bar, is occupied as a Cabin. The forward part being the ladies’ Cabin is separated by a curtain, but at meal times this obstruction is removed, and the table is set the whole length of the boat.”

Berths were the settees along the length of the boat, and other pull-down cots which hung from the walls of the cabin. The space between the berths was barely enough to allow a man to climb into. While they were stable, the berths were allotted “according to the way bill, the first on the list having first choice of place. It was reported by travelers that the air in the upper berths was foul, and the choice spots were on the bottom.

Ironically, the first railroad lines were constructed to connect cities on stretches where canals could not reach. The first railroad in American was finished in the east in1835 but there would not be a railroad in Illinois until 1838. In western Illinois, the Northern Cross Railroad began the run from Meredosia to Jacksonville in 1842. Eventually railroads almost completely supplanted canals for passenger travel, but canals continued to move a great deal of freight.

By 1850 there were over 9,000 miles of railroad track, mostly in short unconnected lines and almost all of it east of the Appalachians.  Passengers in the early days rode in cars that were essentially stage coaches on a railroad track, open carriages which offered little protection from the coal smoke, weather, and fumes of the lubricants used on the brakes. They progressed at about ten miles per hour.  Over a short span of time, trains evolved into elaborate cars with windows and dining rooms with table cloths, as well as parlor cars and sleepers as opulent as any mansion.

In the 1850’s you could travel by train from New York to Chicago, but it required three days and several different rail lines. To go on to Quincy from Chicago would require a stage coach, travel on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and perhaps a railroad. The civil war aided in rapid expansion of track and in 1869 the two coasts were connected by the Continental Railroad. The institution of standard gauge railroad tracks, and in the 1880’s, Standard or Railroad Time helped facilitate progress in uniting and expanding the railroad service.

To an even greater extent than the stage coach, early train travel was a melting pot of society. There was only one class of ticket on the early trains. Con men, crooks, businessmen, socialites, country folk and city people, the elderly and the honeymooners, immigrant, native born, all races, religions and creeds were thrown together in the passenger cars which had no assigned seats and no interior divisions. Unlike the compartmentalized European trains, the American cars were open the entire length of the car.

Beth Lane is the author of Lies Told Under Oath, the story of the 1912 Pfanschmidt murders near Payson, Illinois and a former Executive Director of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County.

Sources:

Deoch, Fulton, ed., New York to Niagara, 1836: The Journal of Thomas S. Woodcock, (1938).

Richter, Amy. Home on the Rails, Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

“Traveling the Erie Canal, 1836”, Eyewitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2004).