Railroads for Michigan

Afterword

475 AFTERWORD A◊erword T his narrative relates the beginnings, growth, and maturity of a vital and fascinating Michigan industry that extends over nearly two centuries. I began writing this near the beginning of the new millennium, and with each passing year it becomes clearer that Michigan’s railroads have played an important, even critical, role in the state’s development, in a process that began before Michigan became a state and extended for nearly the next 100 years. For whatever reason, the railroad’s place in Michigan’s growth is sometimes ignored, occasionally misunderstood, and often underestimated. But plainly put, Michigan would not and could not have developed into what it has become without its railroads. The iron highway, often built in advance of American settlement, brought with it many new communities and shaped the development of every one of its major cities. In ways unimagined only a decade or two before the rails came, early Michiganders saw settlement and movement and intercommunication made speedier as well as easier and less expensive. Industry of every kind, from agriculture to automobiles, from logging to heavy manufacturing, was aided by an iron horse that helped it to develop and enabled it to grow to large size. Michigan’s railroad saga is full of unexpected turns of events and of unusual people. There are upstanding enterprises, a few embarrassments , and some outright frauds. Some men struggled against heavy odds to build a line, while a few others simply fleeced their investors. There are heroes and scalawags. There are business successes and corporate failures. The events told here have such strength that there has been no need for embellishment, or even to color anything favorably. It is always tempting for a historian to consider that a particular activity is socially desirable and that another is repugnant. I have tried to resist this allure and to have this story unfold with candor and without bias. Regretfully, I have had to relate the events only in their essentials. In the research for this work, in itself a far more stimulating undertaking than I believed possible, fascinating details and intriguing detours Afterword 476 came up that called out to be included, but the demands of space have prevailed and forced limits. I have tried throughout, however, to weave the complex history of the railroad business into the broader fabric of Michigan’s society and industry and to place it against the backdrop of the national scene. It is unfortunate that many railroad devotees overlook the essential fact that railroads do not exist in a vacuum, but act in the warp and woof of personal and economic life. To this day, despite a somewhat diminished role, the railroads remain an important part of the state’s industrial community and of its society. I thought it necessary that this narrative include not only significant events but also the important participants. These are the men whose role is often given only the most fleeting mention, but more often who are completely unnoticed. In many fields of history the reader expects to learn as much about the actors as their actions, but unfortunately this is not usually the case in much of what we have today that passes for railroad history. A few plutocrats, such as the Vanderbilts or J. P. Morgan, come immediately to mind, but most railroad men toil in far more modest but not less important situations. Many writers have yielded to the temptation to give the company the credit for its acts. The truth of the matter is that a man or group of men within the company decided there should be the act. It was such men, deliberating and deciding, that inform the corporate acts that shape nearly every event in this narrative. My regret is that I have not been able to do full or even partial justice to most of those who appear herein, nor have I been able to describe in them the vitality and substance that they deserve. Along with such corporate leaders are many others who made their own contribution, fully as important as those who are included, and who have been left unmentioned. Some personal research has developed a list of more than 8,000 executives, directors, officers, managers, and supervisors who were affiliated with Michigan railroads during just the nineteenth century. This is a wide field of opportunity for the student of railroad history. A work of this sort poses one particular problem on which...