Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on November 20, 2007
Enterprise and Society 2007 8(4):784-789; doi:10.1093/es/khm082
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference.
The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads
AARON W. MARRS is on the editorial staff at the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and are not necessarily the official views of the Office of the Historian, the U.S. Department of State, or the U.S. Government. Contact information: 2401 E Street, NW, Room L409, Washington D.C., 20522
E-mail: awmarrs@comcast.net
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
When I was writing my dissertation and thinking about how to frame it, I was particularly struck by two pieces of evidence that I had discovered in my research. The first was a memoir, written in the 1870s, by a Kentuckian named Ebenezer Hiram Stedman. Thinking back to the 1820s, Stedman recalled some of the stories that he had heard about railroads. "For More than two years we heard most Remarkable Storyes about Rail Roads. Some People Said that They had Seen Cariges drawn on a Rail Road by Steam. He was put down as a Munchawson." Some of the stories were so fantastical that locals were probably right to doubt them: "Another Said he had Road on a Coach that went so fast that he had to Breath Through a Brass tube made on purpose So that the Speed woold not take their Breath away. & Some told Such