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| 187 Conclusion A Period of Transition B y the turn of the twentieth century a new transportation technology and a new transportation policy were poised to challenge the dominance of the New Haven ’s steam-powered monopoly and redirect Connecticut ’s transportation history. During the course of the nineteenth century, Connecticut acquired an impressive array of transportation improvements. From the turnpike era, the state inherited a highway network that included sixteen hundred miles of intertown highways and numerous river-spanning bridges, all but a few bridges having reverted to public ownership by the end of the century. Construction of the state’s last rail line in 1902 (a short extension of the Central New England Railway from Tariffville to Springfield, Massachusetts) completed a network of steam railroads that extended to one thousand track miles, accompanied by an equally large system of electric street railways that provided local service within and between Connecticut cities. In outlying areas of the western and eastern highlands, where electricity and street railways had yet to intrude, a small number of stagecoach lines were still active, keeping even these more remote areas connected to the whole state through regular stage service. And on the water, multiple steamboat operators provided daytime and overnight service to New York City from port towns along the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. Compared to the crude network of unimproved dirt roads, man-powered ferries, and limited packet boat service that had existed at the end of the colonial period, transportation in Connecticut had come a long way indeed. Yet this listing of modes and mileages, impressive though it is, does not give the full picture. To this must be added an equally dramatic improvement in speed and comfort. In general, transportation improvements reduced travel times within the state by at least half, and long-distance travel between New York and Boston even more. Whereas early post riders required two weeks for the one-way trip from lower Manhattan to Boston Common, stage service 188 | post roads & iron horses over an improved upper post road in the 1820s dropped the time to thirty-six hours. By the 1880s, a combined steamboat and railroad journey between New York and Boston took just twelve hours, and was made on a convenient overnight schedule in a luxurious hotel-style steamer. If time were of the essence, one could travel the direct route of Connecticut’s Air Line railroad, in which case the trip took only six hours. A century of steam-powered innovation had turned the intimidating 250-mile journey from New York to Boston into a routine undertaking. All of these improvements (including the attempt to extend steamboat and canal services to the upper Connecticut River) were made to serve a state economy that expanded in scope and volume several times during the century: from an essentially colonial economy at the start in which agricultural subsistence was mixed with limited market capitalism to a regional economy by midcentury in which mass production and market capitalism had become the norm, and to an integrated national economy by century’s end in which managerial capitalism played a significant role in many largescale industries, including transportation, as exemplified in New England by the exploits of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. This hundred-year-long flurry of boom and bust market activity transformed Connecticut from a land of family farms into one of the most industrialized and urbanized states in the nation. As industrial output grew, the number of persons living in the state increased as well, from 250,000 in 1800 to one million by the end of the century. So concentrated was this largely industrial workforce that more than half of these one million persons lived in fourteen cities on less than 10 percent of the state’s total land area. This created an average urban density of 1,650 persons per square mile, and concentrations of twice that amount in the state’s three most populous cities: Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport. Meanwhile, the remaining residents of Connecticut lived in a rural landscape at an average density of less than one hundred persons per square mile.∞ In response to technological change, Connecticut’s population had redistributed itself on the landscape in an interesting and dynamic way. Beginning with the incursion of the first English settlers into the broad central valley and coastal slopes of colonial Connecticut, population first spread out across the western and eastern highlands, displacing native Ninnimissinuwock people...

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