The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation’s First Railroad, 1828-1853

This masterful, richly illustrated account of the planning and building of the most important and influential early American railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, is an essential contribution not only to railway history but also to the broader history of the development of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its successful inauguration provided a spur to internal improvements throughout the United States. The railroad affected the development of Baltimore’s port, industry, and urban geography, as well as its financial, educational and cultural institutions. Throughout, the author highlights the men who were involved in that history: promoters, financiers, politicians, lawyers, newspaper editors, fixers and bagmen, civil engineers, inventors and mechanics, foremen, contractors, and feuding Irish laborers, who together built the first long-distance, general-purpose railroad in the United States.