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

When Pennsylvania’s public officials planned, built, and operated its ambitious statewide network of canals in the 1820s and 1830s, slack water navigation and railroads were cutting-edge transportation technologies. New York’s Erie Canal demonstrated the economic, political, and cultural value of this new form of travel and transport, and states like Pennsylvania rushed to copy its success. Unfortunately for these public works projects, America’s short-lived “canal boom” generated few state-coordinated success stories, and railroad construction occurred largely under corporate direction and control. By 1839, the Pennsylvania legislature stopped public funding for canal and railroad construction and a few years later began to unload its extensive network of state-owned canals and railroads at bargain prices. Pennsylvania’s experiment with state-funded canals became one of the greatest financial busts in the history of American internal improvements. However, Robert J. Kapsch does not dwell much on Pennsylvania’s failures in Over the Alleghenies. Instead, he focuses on the great material achievements of the Keystone State’s canal building program, even as he admits that the Panic of 1837, coupled with mismanagement and political corruption, undermined Pennsylvania’s great experiment in state-funded internal improvements.

First and foremost, this is a beautiful book. Kapsch reproduces images, maps, and diagrams that offer a gorgeous firsthand look at the construction and operation of nineteenth-century canals and railroads. After a brief introduction that contextualizes the canal boom of the 1830s, Over the Alleghenies then provides a blow-by-blow account of the construction of Pennsylvania’s state-funded canal system. Separate chapters deal with the geographical regions of the Pennsylvania Canal, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, and the innovative but flawed Allegheny Portage Railroad. A final chapter outlining Thaddeus Stevens’s pet project, the Gettysburg Extension Railroad, serves as both a final technical description of the network as well as a coda for the era of state-funded projects. “Once it was popularly believed that politicians began developing canal and railroad projects for their personal benefit,” Kapsch argues of the Gettysburg Extension, “the credibility of the canal commissioners was lost and the integrity of Pennsylvania’s canals and railroads was severely compromised” (322). Throughout Over the Alleghenies, Kapsch suggests that it was this lack of political discipline and organizational oversight, and not technical failures, that undermined the system. In the end, then, he depicts the rise and fall of the Pennsylvania state system as “captivating to the contemporary reader while simultaneously providing a cautionary tale to others who would undertake similar efforts” (39).

At times, Kapsch’s narrative is more comprehensive than compelling. He sticks close to the sources and draws heavily from the published reports of Pennsylvania’s canal commissioners. Along with the beautifully rendered paintings and drawings, copious quotes from the commissioners and other observers pepper the text. As a result, the story tends to get bogged down in administrative and technical details, and more human aspects—the scourge of cholera and other diseases that accompanied the construction of the canal, for example—are lost among the dense thicket of information. Readers seeking a commentary on the overall political impact of public internal improvements, or the social and cultural impact of canals and railroads, might be disappointed in this book’s materialist approach. With these caveats in mind, though, Kapsch’s painstaking research and careful reconstruction of his story should make Across the Alleghenies the standard account of the rise and fall of Pennsylvania’s state-operated canals and railroads for some time.