The 1897 image on pages 110 through11 of Jeremy Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is a striking bird’s-eye view of Chicago, looking across downtown to the west and south, out to the far distant horizon.
What’s particularly arresting are the thick red lines laid over the map of the rectangular city blocks—lines that represent three elevated railroads and the newly completed Union Loop. This view of the city, Black notes, “provides a different form of aerial view, one in which the use of color drives home the degree of connectivity.”
Anyone looking at the map could see how connected the three west and south elevated lines were—the northern link would come in 1900—and that was because of the Union Loop. From its opening in September 1897, this structure unified Chicago in an unprecedented way and anchored the downtown as the civic center, to such a degree that, within 15 years, the area was being called the Loop.
The map, created by the Poole Bros. cartographic company in the Printers Row area, is titled “All Elevated Trains in Chicago Stop at the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific Railway Station, Only One on the Loop.” It was an advertisement highlighting yet another connection, the railroad’s Van Buren Street station through which Chicagoans could link up with the rest of the nation.
There are a great number of entertaining map books nowadays—books in which maps are presented as beautiful or exotic, coffee table books for paging through at odd moments, something akin to an art book of, say, Rembrandt’s paintings.
Black’s A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps, published by the University of Chicago Press, isn’t one of those. It’s a serious book for serious readers, mainly scholars studying the history of the railroad, the history of humanity over the past two centuries and the ways people and the railroad have intersected, shaping and being shaped by each other.
It is also a book for the general reader who isn’t just looking to browse. It’s for the general reader who wants to get into the nuts and bolts of how and when and why rail lines were constructed in different parts of the world.
Black is emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter and the author of more than 140 books, including A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press) and A History of Britain in 100 Maps (British Library). The Poole Bros. map of the Chicago Loop is also featured in his 2015 Metropolis: Mapping the City (Bloomsbury).
Black’s railroad book is laid out in eight chronological sections. In each section, Black deals with the maps of various nations. Those of England and the United States predominate, but there are also maps from France, China, Italy, Australia and many other countries. As map after map shows, each railroad had a major impact on the people and nations where it operated.
Railroads as a “Social Compact”
The railroads in the second half of the 19th century, Black writes, “represented a social compact” and brought about change that assisted all interests of society, although unequally.
The propertied middle class played a major role, but in co-operation with both the social elite, who were compensated for providing land to enable railway construction, and those who had less of a propertied stake in society. The last group gained paid employment, but the terms of that could be a troubled process.
Throughout the book, Black works to point out not only what is on a map but also what is missing. For instance, a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of 1867 “shows how the railway estate closely abutted dwellings, with repair shops, coal sheds, warehouses and freight depots all taking up much space.” This proximity of homes to railroad structures meant that a fire, such as one six years earlier, could cause great damage.
Not shown, Black notes, is the segregated housing that isolated African Americans. They were also isolated when it came to employment, kept by union rules away from skilled jobs, such as driver and machinist. However, the railroads needed them for lower-status positions as manual laborers, station porters and maids and cooks on trains.
Some of the maps in Black’s book show how the speed and reliability of rail changed life—and even eating habits—in rural and urban settings.
Some of the maps in Black’s book show how the speed and reliability of rail changed life—and even eating habits — in rural and urban settings. For instance, when discussing two railroad maps of Wales, Black writes:
In the 1870s, the railway companies opened up urban markets for liquid cheese, encouraging dairy farmers nationwide to produce “railway milk” rather than farmhouse cheese.
War creates a great demand for maps so that military leaders can determine how best to use the terrain and what sort of opposition they may face.
“The Seat of War”
One of the most distinctive images in Black’s book is a Civil War map, titled “Bird’s Eye View of the Seat of War,” created by the Boston printer Louis Prang in 1862.
To create a bird’s eye view, a cartographer had to imagine being very high in the sky so as to see great distances. Nineteenth-century people loved these maps because they permitted them to “see” from a perspective they could never achieve on their own. For example, the view of the Union Loop in Chicago is drawn as if the mapmaker were high enough to see the distant suburbs.
For his Civil War map, Prang had to imagine himself much higher, at a height near the edge of space. From this vantage, the viewer can see the Potomac River snake in from the lower right corner to Washington, DC, in the center foreground and then look out into the distance to Baltimore, Harpers Ferry, Richmond, Manassas Junction, and Norfolk.
“Railway lines,” Black writes, “are shown as part of the campaign space. This is an accurate account of the tactical, operational and strategic significance of rail.” Due to Confederate raids, the Union army had to use rail lines further north, and Black notes that the North was lucky to have railways that could operate far from the front lines and the predations of enemy troops.
Solving a Map-book Problem
One of the most distinctive aspects of A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is Black’s handling of a problem that has long irritated map-book readers.
Because of their wealth of detail, maps are usually printed in a very large format, sometimes covering several square feet or even square yards of paper. A prime example of this is the road map that a motorist routinely used in the second half of the twentieth century before the proliferation of online map services and GPS systems. The traveler would fold out the map to look at specific areas and then fold it back to an easier-to-carry size.
But atlases and other cartographic books have to shrink maps to fit their format, making it difficult for the reader to spot such features as cities and rivers. This is true for Black’s book as well with its pages of 8 inches by 11 inches. Even a two-page spread is just 16 inches by 11 inches.
However, in eight cases, Black has presented not just a map, but also, on the following two-page spread, an enlarged detail of the map. For example, the detail of “Bird’s Eye View of the Seat of War” is likely to delight any cartography aficionado. At this larger size, the reader can enjoy Prang’s exquisite craftsmanship in representing the landscape with its rises and falls, the rivers and the railroads with their twists and turns, and the relationship of, say, Richmond to its hinterland.
Maps are all about connections, and, with these two-page map details, Black makes it much easier for the reader to see railroads and other aspects of the geography link the fabric of the land together.
A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is available at bookstores and through the University of Chicago Press website.