Chartered in 1827 as the country's first railroad, the legendary Baltimore and Ohio played a unique role in the nation's great railroad drama and became the model for American railroading. John W. Garrett, who served as president of the B&O from 1858 to 1884, ranked among the great power brokers of the time. In this gripping and well-researched account, historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of the B&O's beginning and its unprecedented plan to build a rail line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River, considered to be the most ambitious engineering feat of its time. The B&O's success ignited ""railroad fever"" and helped to catapult railroading to America's most influential industry in the nineteenth century.
Taking the B&O helm during the railroads' expansive growth in the 1850s, Garrett soon turned his attention to the demands of the Civil War. Sander explains how, despite suspected Southern sympathies, Garrett became one of President Abraham Lincoln's most trusted confidantes and strategists, making the B&O available for transporting Northern troops and equipment to critical battles. The Confederates attacked the B&O 143 times, but could not put ""Mr. Lincoln's Road"" out of business. After the war, Garrett became one of the first of the famed Gilded Age tycoons, rising to unimagined power and wealth. Sander explores howwhen he was not fighting fierce railroad wars with competitorsGarrett steered the B&O into highly successful entrepreneurial endeavors, quadrupling track mileage to reach important commercial markets, jumpstarting Baltimore's moribund postwar economy, and constructing lavish hotels in Western Maryland to open tourism in the region. Chronicling the epic technological transformations of the nineteenth century, from rudimentary commercial trade and primitive transportation westward to the railroads' indelible impact on the country and the economy, John W. Garrett and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a vivid account of Garrett's twenty-six-year reign. Sander brings to life the brazen risk-taking, clashing of oversized egos, and opulent lifestyles of the tycoons of the Gilded Age. Drawing from the manuscript collections of the B&O Museum, the Library of Congress, and numerous historical and railroad societies, this richly illustrated portrait of one man's undaunted efforts to improve the B&O and advance its technology will appeal to general readers and railroad enthusiasts alike.
Prologue: Taking Hold of the Throttle
Part One: To the West: 1790-1861 Chapter 1: The Whole Population is in Motion: 1790-1828 Chapter 2: A Flourishing Condition: 1828-1840 Chapter 3: An Era of Fine Pickings: 1840-1855 Chapter 4: The Race to the Ohio: 1852-1858 Chapter 5: The Personification of Firmness: 1858-1860 Chapter 6: Railroad Competition and Coordinationand Political Division: 1858-1861
Part Two ""Mr. Lincoln's Road"": 1861-1865 Chapter 7: In the Thick of the Struggle: 1861 Chapter 8: A Southern Line No More: 1862-1863 Chapter 9: The Right Arm of the Federal Government: 1863-1865
Part Three: Empire Building and Collapse: 1866-1915 Chapter 10: A New World Order: 1866-1871 Chapter 11: Go West, Railroad Presidentand South: 1868-1873 Chapter 12: The Czar of Maryland: 1866-1873 Chapter 13: The Storm Is Upon You: 1873-1877 Chapter 14: His Willpower Remained Unimpaired: 1878-1883 Chapter 15: Final Battles: 1880-1884 Chapter 16: After Garrett: 1884-1915
Epilogue Essay on Sources Acknowledgements
""Sander's biography is a sweeping and grand narrative of one of the nation's seminal and transformative railroad presidents whose enterprise is still hard at work today.""
