Over the Alleghenies: Early Canals and Railroads of Pennsylvania by Robert J. Kapsch (review)

Amid post–great recession discussions of TIGER grants and infrastructure banks, it is useful to recall an earlier age when governments spent generously on the development and implementation of transportation technology. In the generally expansionist period that separated the end of the War of 1812 and the onset of the Panic of 1837, there was a widespread consensus that internal improvements would generate prosperity and advance the common good. No state spent more lavishly than Pennsylvania, and by the 1840s the commonwealth boasted the most extensive turnpike and canal network in the United States. Yet Pennsylvania could not overcome the constraints imposed by geography and politics, and the public works drove the state into insolvency and tarnished the principle that governments should assume responsibility for so basic a necessity as mobility.

Robert J. Kapsch has given historians an excellent overview of the state-owned canals and railroads that promised to open the length and the breadth of Pennsylvania to economic development. Despite the title, the book does not offer a comprehensive treatment of all of the early canals and railroads in the commonwealth. The successful Lehigh Navigation and Schuylkill Navigation barely rate a mention, and discussion of the pioneering railroad operated by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company is likewise absent. The focus is instead on the publicly built and operated links of the Philadelphia–Pittsburgh Main Line of Public Works, as well as various local feeder canals. A thorough, book-length study of the state system is nonetheless badly overdue, as an update to politically charged polemics such as Avard L. Bishop, “Corrupt Practices Associated with the Building and Operation of the State Works of Pennsylvania,” Yale Review 15 (1907), and Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania 1776–1860 (1948)—a book that Kapsch does not cite.

Over the Alleghenies is well-written, easily accessible to lay readers, and graced with more than a hundred superb maps and illustrations, many in color. Those illustrations alone make the book a bargain at the price and with their captions could almost stand alone as an overview of the construction of the canal and rail system. The extensive endnotes attest to thorough research and careful attention to detail.

As the former chief of the Historic American Buildings Survey for the Historic American Engineering Record, Kapsch is certainly qualified to discuss engineering and architecture. Indeed the book is organized primarily as a descriptive overview of the various segments of the state’s canal and railroad system, rather than as an analysis of the evolution of transportation policy in Pennsylvania. The initial chapter provides a useful, if brief, description of “Early America and the Coming of the Transportation Revolution.” While the phrase “transportation revolution” is commonly used, and formed the title of George Rogers Taylor’s seminal 1951 work, it misses the nuanced co-evolution of internal improvements and public policy, which is better reflected in recent books by historians such as Sean Patrick Adams, Robert G. Angevine, and Andrew M. Schocket. The second chapter offers a capsule history of the state system and by itself can serve as a useful resource for anyone seeking a brief explanation of the rationale for such extensive construction and the reasons for eventual failure. The remaining chapters are each devoted to one segment of the public works—including the Eastern, Western, and Juniata Divisions of the Pennsylvania Canal; the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad; the Allegheny Portage Railroad; and other, lesser canal projects.

The book’s organization to some extent reflects the propensity of Pennsylvania’s canal and railroad builders to construct infrastructure in a fragmented and uncoordinated manner, and makes it easy for readers to peruse the development of specific projects. However, this approach unavoidably produces considerable repetition, as each chapter follows a familiar litany of inadequate surveying, parsimonious legislative appropriations, shoddy construction, delayed completion, lower-than-expected traffic levels, disappointing revenues, and flood-induced destruction. In addition, Kapsch employs...