John W. Garrett and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
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A01=Kathleen Waters Sander
Abraham Lincoln
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Author_Kathleen Waters Sander
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B&O
Baltimore
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BGH
Category=KJZ
Category=KNGT
Category=NHK
Category=WGF
Civil War
COP=United States
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eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
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Garrett
Industry
Language_English
MD
Ohio
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
Railroad
Robber Baron
softlaunch
Trains
Product details
- ISBN 9781421422206
- Weight: 726g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jul 2017
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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 how-when he was not fighting fierce railroad wars with competitors-Garrett 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. Sander brings to life the brazen risk-taking, clashing of oversized egos, and opulent lifestyles of the Gilded Age tycoons in this richly illustrated portrait of one man's undaunted efforts to improve the B&O and advance its technology. 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.
Kathleen Waters Sander teaches history at the University of Maryland University College. She is the author of The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900 and Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age.
