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Popular Mechanics Picture History of American Transportation HARD COVER 1952
Popular Mechanics Picture History of American Transportation 312 Pages
HARD COVER
BETTER THAN any loyalty test is an American's reaction to the history of his country. We hope that the story this book unfolds gives you the same warming of the heart that it did for the editors who prepared the material. For this is the story of how a peculiar breed of men conquered, first the tangle of a wilderness, then the space of a sprawling continent.
For nearly a decade after the founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620, these first settlers hardly dared go more than a few yards from their settlements. From the standpoint of civilized transportation, the colonists were worse off than the ancient Romans-although there were wheelwrights among the early American colonists, they did not at first have a chance to ply their trade. In summer the colonists made their short journeys on foot or on horseback; in winter they used crude sleds.
Yet a hundred years later their grandsons were settling on the rim of the western prairies, and by 1830 wagon trains were rumbling from St. Louis to San Francisco in six months. By 1869 a man could cross the continent by railroad in seven days, and today his descendants can make the trip by air in the same number of hours.
The next time you're out seeing America, keep an eye out for evidence of the glorious story of American transportation. There are plenty of signs remaining. From an airliner flying over the Utah desert you can see, faintly but unmistakably, the wheel marks of the Oregon trail, ruts left by the heavy-laden prairie schooners after 1800.
A little knowledge and imagination can carry you back farther than that. Know, as you drive
over Cleveland's Ridge Avenue or walk past the honky-tonks and second-hand clothing stores of Chicago's Clark Street, that beneath the layers of asphalt and stone lies ground over which Indian runners once sped along foot-wide trails through the Ohio and Illinois country.
Driving in the East or Middle West you may come across a long, straight, grass-covered ditch, its outlines softened by time. Here was a canal and towpath that once teemed with barges, straining mules, and shouting drivers.
Traveling the modern highway from Cumberland, Md., to Washington, Pa., you will be following the route of the old National Road, America's first highway worthy of the name. You will pass stone inns built before 1820 as stopovers for stagecoach passengers.Taking the B. & 0. out of Baltimore, your train will pass over a stone arch bridge, the Carroll-town Viaduct, built for the original B. & 0. tracks in 1830, and you may think of the time when a steam locomotive raced a horse-and lost.
In Springfield, Mass., you can find the street on which the Duryea brothers ran the first gasoline automobile in the United States. On the beach near Kitty Hawk, N. C., you can walk on the historic dunes over which the Wright brothers soared in man's first powered, heavier-than-air flights.
At the riverside docks in Cincinnati, Louisville, or St. Louis you will see a few of the old-time sidewheel steamboats which had their gilded era on the Mississippi and the Missouri.
West of the Mississippi, automobile highways follow the trails of Lewis and Clark, Butterfield's stage line, and the covered-wagon routes to
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