Wider Markets

. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the economic highways of the nation lay along its waterways: the coastlines and rivers, and, after 1810, the artificial rivers carved into the land in the form of canals. But by 1850 the railroads were beginning to redraw the economic map, connecting regions along radically new lines, opening overland channels of buying and selling. As the U.S. Senate observed in an 1852 report analyzing the profound impact of the railroads, the cost of overland transportation confined prerailroad, landlocked farmers to tight circles of distribution: estimating the cost of wagon transportation at 15 cents per ton per mile, and the value of wheat at $1.50 per bushel, the Senate calculated that a farmer transporting his crop "with only a common earth road as an avenue" would spend its entire sale value getting it...