The Iron Horse and the Windy City: How Railroads Shaped Chicago (review)

Since their initial development, railroads have always been central to the development of Chicago as the transportation hub of the Midwest and the nation. Indeed, they remain central in the twenty-first century. Although the number of trains and trackage declined precipitously as consolidations and deregulation took hold in the twentieth century, the actual tonnage hauled and the number of trains have grown. Consequently, Chicago found itself "as inundated with railroad trains in 2001 as it had been a century earlier" (p. 220).

Young begins, appropriately, with preindustrial Chicago when passengers and freight traveled primarily by water. Although it lacked an immediately useful deep harbor, as well as strong water power resources to provide cheap energy, the area enjoyed an overriding geographical advantage. The Fort Dearborn settlement that became Chicago had obvious access to New York from its location on Lake Michigan. At the same time, it was less than 100 miles from the Illinois River, which gave it access to the Mississippi and Missouri watersheds.

To take advantage of the relative proximity of the Illinois River's access to the Mississippi River system, the state committed itself to the Illinois and Michigan Canal (I&M) in the 1820s when the canal-building craze was in full swing. Not completed until 1848, the I&M helped develop the interior and certainly interdicted the river-borne commerce on the developing agricultural landscape, while connecting Great Lakes commerce at Chicago with that of the western rivers. Yet, it was limited to water-borne shipping and, consequently, proved of limited value to distant lands.

Although important, Chicago's strategic geographical advantage could support only a modest maritime trading and retail outpost on the nation's western frontier. What transformed everything and allowed for vastly greater expansion, of course, was technological change in the form of the steam engine and Americans' continuing westward expansion. In the 1840s, a resulting demand for railroads swept the region as new arrivals and manufacturing concerns clamored for cheap transportation to provide access, via Chicago, to the Northeast and beyond. Earlier railroads had proven unable to find adequate capital. The state's ambitious Internal Improvements Program of 1837–1838 had hoped to resolve that problem by providing rail transportation throughout Illinois, but it had run afoul of the hard times of the 1830s.

As the economic climate improved and settlement increased in the following decade, investors and entrepreneurs focused seriously on the port city of 30,000 at the tip of Lake Michigan and the vast, rich hinterland it served. Illinois chartered new rail lines that joined others which frantically built north, west, and south of Chicago. Meanwhile, the great eastern trunk lines after 1850 also felt compelled to reach Chicago and, through it, the West: "Thus Chicago almost by accident, but certainly not due to any grand scheme by its civic and political leaders, became the nation's great railroad junction" (p. 34).

As Chicago reached what Young calls a critical mass in commerce, it quickly became a fundamental linchpin in the nation's economic fabric. At the same time, it spawned large-scale manufacturing and meatpacking industries within the city and its environs. Similarly, the city's sprawling urban geography was shaped directly by its plethora of railroads. Although the automobile is commonly credited or blamed for suburbanization, in Chicago, it was largely the railroads that fostered suburban sprawl. In the late nineteenth century, as the author describes the process, throughout the region "the railroads began to develop settlements at outlying outposts along their lines, or in many cases houses began to spring up near the train depots in farm communities. As the spread and efficiency of train travel increased, those settlements evolved into suburbs" (p. 76), and the city's mass transit system was born in and around Chicago's core.

Young notes other ways in which the railroad shaped the contours of the city...