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Author: Andrew R. Black Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807174092 Category : Transportation Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
Author: Andrew R. Black Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807174092 Category : Transportation Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
Author: Cliff Schexnayder Publisher: ISBN: 9781942155072 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
[This book] traces the interactions between those who worked to build the Hoosac Tunnel of Massachusetts and those who struggled mightily to hinder its construction. The driving force behind the Tunnel and a thread through the book is Alvah Crocker, paper magistrate from Fitchburg. The first to broach the idea of tunneling the Mountain is the father of American Civil Engineering, Loammi Baldwin Jr., son of the Revolutionary War hero and builder of the Middlesex Canal, Loammi Sr. There is a parade of builders: Herman Haupt, who during the Civil War earned a reputation as Lincoln's railroad man, engineers Thomas Doane and John Brooks, who pushed China merchant turned railroad man John M. Forbes' railroads into Iowa before the Civil War, and finally the Shanly brothers from Canada who achieved daylight through the Mountain. --Publisher.
Author: Chris H. Wondoloski Publisher: CreateSpace ISBN: 9781508526407 Category : Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
The Hoosac Tunnel Murders begins when seventeen-year old Ginger O'Leary is driven from her bed in the dead of night by a vision of murder within the depths of the "bloody pit." Terrified by what she has experienced, Ginger could little know that this gift from her ancestors would not only set her on the path of self-discovery, but also a quest to secure justice for the victims. It's 1865 and two Massachusetts railroads are competing for an exclusive route across the state to Troy, New York and the emerging markets of Chicago and the west. However, a mountain range nearly five miles wide at its base blocks completion of the northern route. Since 1852 the plan has been to blast a hole through what engineers called the Hoosac Tunnel and workers sardonically named the "bloody pit." So far, all the project had accomplished was to devour money invested in it, ruin careers of engineers who designed it and kill many of the men who worked on it. When a nitroglycerine blast kills two men and injures one, another accident is assumed. But the haunting of Ginger by souls of the men crushed and ripped apart in the blast told a different story. The injured man may have been a friend, but he was also their murderer! But, why? Just when Constable Captain Charles O'Leary, Constable Sergeant CJ Mulcahy and Ginger are about to get an answer they find an empty cell and are confronted with the probability that some very powerful people did not want that question answered. But, these people haven't met Ginger O'Leary and the power of An Dara Sealladh. They also haven't met Doctor Samuel N. Briggs and his motley crew of almost criminals who assist Ginger, her Da and her two loves in ferreting out the truth.
Author: Maynard Seider Publisher: ISBN: 9781887043397 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 652
Book Description
For generations of working-class families who have lived in Massachusetts' northern Berkshires, reality looks like Rust Belt America. Maynard Seider, an activist sociologist who has taught and researched in the area for more than three decades, places the history of the North Berkshire region in the context of U.S. and global history.
Author: Will Ellis Publisher: Schiffer Publishing ISBN: 9780764347610 Category : Photography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
From Manhattan and Brooklyn's trendiest neighbourhoods to the far-flung edges of the outer boroughs, Ellis captures the lost and lonely corners of New York. Step inside the New York you never knew, with 200 eerie images of urban decay
Author: Robert Oakes Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1467142794 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1
Book Description
"Before it became a haven for arts and culture, the Berkshires was a rugged, sparsely populated frontier. From the early days of Revolutionary fervor and industrial enterprise to today's tourism, many chilling stories remain. A lost girl haunts a cemetery in Washington, and mysterious spirits still perform at Tanglewood. From the ghostly halls of the Houghton Mansion to the eerie events at the Hoosac Tunnel, residents and visitors alike have felt fear and awe in these hills, telling tales of shadow figures, disembodied voices and spectral trains. Author Robert Oakes, who has given ghost tours at The Mount in Lenox for more than a decade, leads this spirited journey through history."--Page 4 of cover.
Author: Timothy Starr Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1467105600 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
New York's Capital District was ideally situated to become one of the nation's earliest and most important transportation crossroads. The Mohawk River was the only water level gap in the Appalachian range to the west, which led to the construction of the Erie Canal. Soon after its completion, the state's first railroad began operating between Albany and Schenectady in 1831. Other pioneer railroads followed, heading north to Canada, south to New York City, west to Chicago, and east to Boston. Over the next century, railroads like the New York Central, Boston & Albany, Boston & Maine, and Delaware & Hudson built extensive passenger stations, freight and classification yards, and repair shops in the tri-city region. Passenger operations continue today at the Schenectady and Albany-Rensselaer Amtrak stations, while the Selkirk Yard is still an important classification point for CSX Transportation.
Author: Andrew R. Black
Author: Andrew R. Black
Author: Cliff Schexnayder
Author: Orson Dalrymple
Author: Carl R. Byron
Author: Chris H. Wondoloski
Author: Brian A. Donelson
Author: Maynard Seider
Author: Will Ellis
Author: Robert Oakes
Author: Timothy Starr