Kate Viens

“To try the speed”: Adventures in the Development of Massachusetts Railroads, 1826-1850

Railroads have long been a metaphor for the disruptive forces of technology and modernization in the American Studies canon, from Thoreau’s Walden to Leo Marx’s classic study, The Machine in the Garden. But how did railroads become a feature of American life? My dissertation answers this question by recovering the lived experiences of rural Massachusetts residents of the early nineteenth century. I employ a humanistic approach influenced by Jan de Vries’s theory of the “Industrious Revolution” and Joyce Appleby’s definition of capitalism as a cultural system that challenges traditional norms. My work draws on histories of race and gender, literary theory, and cultural geography. I study remote hill towns, where a keen knowledge of the environment gave rural residents confidence to improve the landscape and set up new water-powered machines to spin Southern cotton. As the first reports of the new rail technology arrived from England, they made personal connections and read newspapers and journals in a process of knowledge transfer that built upon their lived experience. Railroads captured their imagination. Soon, rural residents were at the forefront of a railroad boom that produced more than three dozen short rail lines throughout the state by the mid 1840s, even as it led to conflicts over land taking, Irish immigration, and access by women, African Americans, and other groups. Because Massachusetts was a national leader in education, politics, law, medicine, reform, arts, and culture in this period, my work contributes to a new understanding of key topics in the early republic.