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The Early Business History of Four Massachusetts Railroads
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Extract
This study is an exploration, on a limited scale, of the part played by businessmen in early railroad construction and operation. The business history of railroading is significant not only for that industry but also for the leadership that the railroads maintained among the large business units in the nineteenth century and the consequent influence on organization, management methods, and policies of big business. In this paper we are concerned only with a sample, the beginnings in the decades of the 'thirties and 'forties, in order (1) to see wherein our knowledge of early railroad history needs enlarging and (2) to demonstrate the type of information that can be gleaned from the manuscript minutes, reports, and correspondence of early railroads.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1951
References
Author's Acknowledgment: This article was written while I was a Business History Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1949-1950, under the supervision of Professor N. S. B. Gras and Professor Henrietta M. Larson. It is the first of a series of articles to appear in the Bulletin on this subject.
1 Among the recent exceptions to that type of writing are the following: Kirkland, Edward C., Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1820–1900 (Cambridge, 1948), 2 vols.Google Scholar, is a major contribution by an economic historian, but Professor Kirkland has apparently made very little use of the manuscript records of the railroads. Stevens, Frank Walter, The Beginnings of the New York Central Railroad: A History (New York, 1926)Google Scholar, is based upon manuscript records and especially for the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad presents a good summary of the contents of the minutes. The popular account by Harlow, Alvin F., entitled Steelways of New England (New York, 1946)Google Scholar, is based upon broad reading of both internal records and other accounts and catches the spirit of the administrators. Charles E. Fisher's “The Western Railroad,” in the Bulletin of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, No. 69, is the only complete history of the Western Rail Road based upon the original sources.
2 It would be more precise to say petty capitalist rather than the small businessman. To business historians, petty capitalist includes the small businessman, professional man, and the independent farmer. The factory owner or agent of that day sometimes was a transitional figure with a background of a sedentary merchant. He was an incipient industrialist; probably not enough development had occurred to call him an industrial capitalist. The sedentary merchant was the king of the mercantile capitalists, sometimes less accurately called a merchant prince. I am following the usage of business historians when referring to industrial capitalists; that is, industrial capitalists include railroad businessmen as well as managers of manufacturing plants (large-scale specialists).
3 Manuscript Minutes of the Stockholders and the Board of Directors cf the Boston & Worcester Rail Road, July 25, 1831-January, 1843; Manuscript Minutes of the Stockholders and of the Board of Directors of the Western Rail Road, together with looseleaf committee reports and correspondence, January 8, 1336-January, 1843. These manuscripts are part of the collection on the Boston & Worcester and the Western roads deposited in Baker Library of Harvard University. At the headquarters of the Boston & Maine Railroad I read the Minutes of the Stockholders and of the Board of Directors of the Boston & Lowell Rail Road, March 9, 1831-June 6, 1846; of the Eastern Rail Road, July 7, 1835-July 10, 1843; and of the Andover & Wilmington Rail Road, May 28, 1833–May 10, 1837, and its successor, the Andover & Haverhill, May 10, 1837–April, 1839. Besides reading all the minutes and available correspondence and reports for these years I scanned some of the later records.
Baker Library has a broken file of the annual and special reports to the stockholders and to the legislature which I have used. The Minutes of the Boston & Lowell include a manuscript copy of all these reports for that road.
Limited time prevented me from using the Boston Daily Advertiser and other local newspapers. I examined the American Railroad Journal but it contains very little material on the roads in this study not otherwise available in the manuscript and printed records mentioned above.
4 Kirkland, op. cit., vol. i, p. 103.
5 The Quincy road was constructed to haul granite a few miles to the shore where it went by water to be used in the Bunker Hill Monument. Gridley Bryant, quarryman and engineer, built the road in 1827, using gravity and horses to furnish the motive power. The Stockton & Darlington Railway in England was two years old at that time but the Massachusetts legislature hesitated to accept the English experience as an adequate precedent. Perkins was influential in overcoming the opposition and obtaining a charter. Ibid., vol. i, p. 100; Stuart, Charles B., Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America (New York, 1871), pp. 122–127.Google Scholar
6 Kirkland, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 103–111; Harlow, op. cit., pp. 36–70.
7 Report of a Committee on the Boston and Lowell Railroad (Boston, 1831), pp. 3–4, deposited in Baker Library, Harvard University.
8 Ibid, pp. 4–14.
9 Dated July 4, 1831. On file at Baker Library, in the corporate records of the Boston & Worcester Rail Road.
10 Report by Bliss, Number 21, Clerk's File of the Western Rail Road, 1837; Bliss, George, Historical Memoir of the Western Railroad (Springfield, Mass., 1863), pp. 21–30Google Scholar; Kirkland, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 125–128; Harlow, op. cit., pp. 116–121.
11 See Martin, Joseph G., Twenty-One Years in the Boston Stock Market (Boston, 1856), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar
12 Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Passed at the Several Sessions of the General Court of Massachusetts, Beginning May, 1828, and ending March, 1831, p. 613. This Act preceded the granting of the charters of all the roads in this study except that of the Boston & Lowell.
13 Patrick Tracy Jackson held three jobs simultaneously, serving as president, treasurer, and agent of the Boston & Lowell. After nearly three years, he relinquished the presidency, and in another two years, after the road was operating, he resigned as agent.
14 Directors' Minutes of the Boston & Lowell Hail Road, January 14, 1836, April 25, May 31, July 19, October 23, 1837, January 21, 1842.
15 The stockholders did not audit the treasurer's books until alter the road had been constructed. See the Stockholders' Minutes of the Boston & Lowell Rail Road, January 6, 1836, and each succeeding January.
16 Directors' Minutes of the Eastern Rail Road, February 5, 1841. Only three committees are mentioned here, but this move was anticipated in the previous November, December, and January, when nine other committees were assigned tasks that in previous years had been handled by the executive committee. In March, April, and May, five additional committees on as many subjects were appointed.
17 Binney, Breed, Hooper, Neal, Thayer, and Bryant.
18 Directors' Minutes of the Western Rail Road, February 7, 12, 1840.
19 Ibid., March 27-May 14, 1840. Lincoln was one of the four directors elected by the state legislature.
20 To be discussed in Section V, “The Early Development of Railroad Officialdom.”
21 Directors' Minutes of the Boston & Lowell Hail Road, April 10, 1837.
22 Directors' Minutes of the Eastern Rail Koad, May 8, 1837.
23 Directors' Minutes of the Eastern Rail Road, January 18, 1839; Stockholder's Minutes of the Eastern Rail Road, May 21, 1840.
24 This seems to be somewhat the case on the Mohawk and Hudson Rail Road, where Churchill C. Cambreling, a business associate of John Jacob Astor, was the commissioner or agent. However, the directors lived in New York City and the road ran between Albany and Schenectady. The directors apparently did little but review the activities of their chief official. Stevens, op. cit., especially pp. 22–23, 95–99.