The Leiper Railroad was a '
family business
A family business is a commercial organization in which decision-making is influenced by multiple generations of a family, related by blood or marriage or adoption, who has both the ability to influence the vision of the business and the willingn ...
–built' horse drawn
railroad
Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a pre ...
of , constructed in 1810 after the quarry owner,
Thomas Leiper
Thomas Leiper (15 December 1745 – 6 July 1825) was a Scottish American businessman, banker and politician who owned a successful tobacco exportation business as well as several mills and stone quarries. He served as a lieutenant in the Philad ...
, failed to obtain a charter with legal
rights-of-way
Right of way is the legal right, established by grant from a landowner or long usage (i.e. by prescription), to pass along a specific route through property belonging to another.
A similar ''right of access'' also exists on land held by a gov ...
to instead build his desired canal along
Crum Creek
Crum Creek (from the Dutch, meaning "crooked creek") is a creek in Delaware County and Chester County, Pennsylvania, flowing approximately , generally in a southward direction and draining into the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. I ...
. The quarry man's 'make-do' railroad was the continent's first chartered railway, first operational non-temporary railway, first well-documented railroad, and first constructed railroad also meant to be permanent.
The credit of constructing the first permanent tramway in America may therefore be rightly given to Thomas Leiper
Thomas Leiper (15 December 1745 – 6 July 1825) was a Scottish American businessman, banker and politician who owned a successful tobacco exportation business as well as several mills and stone quarries. He served as a lieutenant in the Philad ...
. He was the owner of a fine quarry not far from Philadelphia, and was much concerned to find an easy mode of carrying stone to tide-water. That a railway would accomplish this end he seem to have had no doubt. To test the matter, and at the same time afford a public exhibition of the merits of tramways, he built a temporary track in the yard of the Bull's Head Tavern in Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...
. The tramway was some sixty feet long, had a grade of one inch and a half to the yard, and up it, to the amazement of the spectators, one horse used to draw a four-wheeled wagon loaded with a weight of ten thousand pounds. This was the summer of 1809. Before autumn laborers were at work building a railway from the quarry to the nearest landing, a distance of three quarters of a mile. In the spring of 1810 the road began to be used and continued in using during eighteen years.
by John Bach McMaster, page 494, ''A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War''[
]
Leiper
Thomas Leiper
Thomas Leiper (15 December 1745 – 6 July 1825) was a Scottish American businessman, banker and politician who owned a successful tobacco exportation business as well as several mills and stone quarries. He served as a lieutenant in the Philad ...
was a Pennsylvania Militia officer who served during several campaign years, first failing to obtain allowance to build a canal connecting his quarry near
Crum Creek
Crum Creek (from the Dutch, meaning "crooked creek") is a creek in Delaware County and Chester County, Pennsylvania, flowing approximately , generally in a southward direction and draining into the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. I ...
to
Ridley Creek
Ridley Creek is a tributary of the Delaware River in Chester and Delaware counties, Pennsylvania in the United States.Gertler, Edward. ''Keystone Canoeing'', Seneca Press, 2004.
The entire drainage basin is in the suburban Philadelphia area, but ...
,
[Gamst, Frederick C.; , Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
] reaching flood-waters on the estuary of the
Delaware Valley tidewater in
Delaware County, Pennsylvania
Delaware County, colloquially referred to as Delco, is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. With a population of 576,830 as of the 2020 census, it is the fifth-most populous county in Pennsylvania and the third=smallest in area.
Del ...
.
First, he commissioned a short experimental horse-powered railway in 1809
which proved a horse-drawn heavy wagon heavily loaded could advance successfully against a stiff gradient a bit over 4%.
The track, with a gauge,
[Gamst, Frederick C.; , Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum; ''"First, in 1795 on Boston's Beacon Hill, a wooden railway of about a two-foot gauge in the form of a double-track inclined plane took earth removed from the top of the hill to its base. This excavation prepared a level area for the new State House of 1798, designed by the architect and construction engineer Charles Bulfinch."''
] had a grade of 1-1/2 inch to the yard (1 : 24 or about 4%) over its total length of and proves satisfactory when tested with a loaded car. The test track had created quite a scene, so it and the railway begun that year was both studied by nearby Penn students and professors, and was much covered in the press — when the permanent railroad began operations, it ''was on every-day operational display in the nation's largest, and most industrialized city.''
It operated regularly as a private carrier between 1810 and 1828 in what is now
Nether Providence Township,
Delaware County,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
, a short distance away from the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
(Penn) within Philadelphia itself, so the railroad became the ''first 'meant to be permanent'
and documented railway''
in North America, and first built by civilians. Ironically, when an 1824 petition finally succeeded, the railroad was replaced by ''the 'long desired canal' ''just as the world elsewhere was turning to and regularly were considering adopting railways for movement of heavy and bulk goods, as well as people. Then, in 1852, the railway was reopened and it replaced in turn, the
Leiper Canal.
Historical context
In the 1930s, a Harvard economics study observed that post Revolutionary War towns throughout the country experienced phenomenal growth rates, citing 133% per decade as a sustained average growth rate, that continued into the 1920s. This means, for every 1000 citizens, ten years later there were 2330.
From the start of the 1880s, most of the well known, or the individuals commonly thought of as our country's founding fathers, as well as many lesser known men of means and affairs had focused on transportation as being a problem. The 13 colonies had saturated the riverine valleys so far as they would support agrarian life-styles in vogue for the times, and industry was building only slowly but blocked by lack of fuels and worse, lack of means to transport it the tens or hundreds of miles it need come if a foundry or mill were to make use of it.
Hence, after the mid-1780s, the historical record shows repeated petitions to allow river improvements or charters for turnpikes and toll roads, so historians can correctly paint the era as either the canal age or the turnpike age. In 1793, the engineers of the
Middlesex Canal
The Middlesex Canal was a 27-mile (44-kilometer) barge canal connecting the Merrimack River with the port of Boston. When operational it was 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, and 3 feet (0.9 m) deep, with 20 locks, each 80 feet (24 m) long and between 10 and ...
, located a hydraulic cement and generally showed the way forward, and for the next several decades, canals to support commerce such as the
Delaware and Hudson Canal, the
Potomack Canal, the Raritan, the Morris, or the more famous
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal and occasionally called the "Grand Old Ditch," operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River between Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. It replaced the Potomac Canal, ...
,
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,
Lehigh Canal
The Lehigh Canal, or the Lehigh Navigation Canal, is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of twenty years, beginning in 1818. The low ...
,
Schuylkill Canal and
Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...
&
Illinois Canals all cheapened long distance shipping dramatically, spurred commerce, and enabled the
industrial revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, including the production of enough iron to make railroads to create their own assassins.
As the Leiper Canal was being constructed, a number of other railroad projects of far more ambitious scope were taking the field:
# Pennsylvania's second charter was included in the
Main Line of Public Works
The Main Line of Public Works was a package of legislation passed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1826 to establish a means of transporting freight between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It funded the construction of various long-proposed can ...
legislation, authorizing the
Allegheny Portage Railroad
The Allegheny Portage Railroad was the first railroad constructed through the Allegheny Mountains in central Pennsylvania, United States; it operated from 1834 to 1854 as the first transportation infrastructure through the gaps of the Alleghen ...
which intended to crawl over the Alleghenies with barges on a railroad,
# while in New Jersey,
John Stevens built a test track in 1825 to experimentally settle the great traction debate and runs a steam locomotive around it in his summer home estate,
Hoboken, New Jersey
Hoboken ( ; Unami: ') is a city in Hudson County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the city's population was 60,417. The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program calculated that the city's population was 58,690 i ...
. In 1830, this would result in the
Camden and Amboy Railroad
The United New Jersey Railroad and Canal Company (UNJ&CC) was a railroad company which began as the important Camden & Amboy Railroad (C&A), whose 1830 lineage began as one of the eight or ten earliest permanent North AmericanList of Earliest Am ...
incorporation and charter to connect New York harbor with Philadelphia-Trenton by fast railcar service, the first railroad to be 'focused first' on passenger traffic, with the competitive aim of taking on lucrative stagecoach services.
# Pennsylvania's second private charter was given to the
Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad
A predecessor to the Class I Delaware and Hudson Railway, the 1820s-built Delaware and Hudson Canal Company Gravity Railroad ''('D&H Gravity Railroad')'' was a historic gravity railroad incorporated and chartered in 1826 with land grant rights ...
(c.1826, o:1830),
# whereas the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over chartered the Leiper Railroad's soulmate: the industrial
animal powered
Granite Railroad
The Granite Railway was one of the first railroads in the United States, built to carry granite from Quincy, Massachusetts, to a dock on the Neponset River in Milton. From there boats carried the heavy stone to Charlestown for construction o ...
opened in
Quincy, Massachusetts, to convey quarried granite for the Bunker Hill monument. It later becomes a common carrier railroad and lasted into the 20th century.
# In the meantime, New York chartered the 16-mile route between Albany and Schenectady for the
Mohawk and Hudson Railroad on April 17, 1826 (c.1826, o:1831), based on the idea it was better to travel an hour instead of a day circuitously on the canal around a waterfall.
# and in 1827 the
Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company built and began operating the
Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad, while also in 1827, Maryland and Virginia clear needs and issue the charter and rights-of-ways for the ambitious Baltimore and Ohio
— which becomes the (3rd or 4th) next operational railroad (depending upon how Liepers' withdrawal is counted and scored), running tests in 1829 about the time Leiper and Son are shifting from rail to canal and
# The ''
Stourbridge Lion
The ''Stourbridge Lion'' was a railroad steam locomotive. It was the first foreign built locomotive to be operated in the United States, and one of the first locomotives to operate outside Britain. It takes its name from the lion's face painted ...
'', first
steam locomotive imported into the USA, is tested along tracks built by the
Delaware and Hudson
The Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H) is a railroad that operates in the Northeastern United States. In 1991, after more than 150 years as an independent railroad, the D&H was purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CP). CP operates D&H ...
company on August 8, 1829. Deemed too heavy for the company's rails, it and its three brethren are converted to stationary engines.
# 1830 ushers in a flurry of transportation (railroad & canal) incorporations, charter applications, grants and beginnings of construction, and completions of construction and partial or full railway openings.
## The American built
## The B&O opens its first stretch to Ellicott's Mills and begins regular scheduled passenger services on schedule, May 24, 1830.
# 1830 the
Beaver Meadows Railroad
The Beaver Meadow Railroad & Coal Company (BMRC) was chartered April 7, 1830, to build a railroad from the mines near Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania, beyond Broad Mountain along Beaver Creek to Penn Haven and along the Lehigh River through Mauch ...
from
Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania
Beaver Meadows is a borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The population was 897 at the 2020 U.S. census.
Geography
Beaver Meadows is located in northwestern Carbon County at (40.928438, ...
, is incorporated and construction commenced to open a second major coal field to the
Lehigh Canal
The Lehigh Canal, or the Lehigh Navigation Canal, is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of twenty years, beginning in 1818. The low ...
at a second loading facility in
Parryville beyond the Lehigh Gap—this offered a more efficient use of the canal without jamming up the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk. This would form the seed company of the first class
Lehigh Valley Railroad
The Lehigh Valley Railroad was a railroad built in the Northeastern United States to haul anthracite coal from the Coal Region in Pennsylvania. The railroad was authorized on April 21, 1846 for freight and transportation of passengers, goods, ...
after the 1870s.
Built two decades into the brief
American canal age, it ran about along
Crum Creek
Crum Creek (from the Dutch, meaning "crooked creek") is a creek in Delaware County and Chester County, Pennsylvania, flowing approximately , generally in a southward direction and draining into the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania. I ...
in
Delaware County to its mouth in Eastern
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
's
Delaware Valley.
[
]
After rights to build the canal were initially denied, for 18 years a horse-drawn industrial railroad, the Leiper Railroad, was used to carry stone products from the quarry to the Delaware dock before the opening of the canal.
[ Located close to the University of Pennsylvania, one historian has opined that the idea was not Leiper's but belonged to TBDL and found, who became a noted engineer and steam locomotive builder.
The tramway became a shortline branch of the B&O railroad in the 1880s.
Crum Creek's mouth is located at .]
Efforts were made in the 1930s to preserve the remnants of the railroad.
The Thomas Leiper Estate
The Thomas Leiper Estate, also known as Avondale, is a historic estate located at Wallingford in Nether Providence Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It was built by Thomas Leiper around 1785, and named Strath Haven after Leiper's birth ...
was added to the National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...
in 1970. The Thomas Leiper House has been turned into a public museum in Wallingford.
See also
*Oldest railroads in North America
This is a list of the earliest railroads in North America, including various railroad-like precursors to the general modern form of a company or government agency operating locomotive-drawn trains on metal tracks.
Railroad-like entities (1700 ...
* Leiper Canal
References
External links
A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War
A Brief Review of Railroad History from the Earliest Period to the Year 1894
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leiper Railroad
Railway lines opened in 1810
Horse-drawn railways
Railway lines closed in 1828
Companies based in Philadelphia
Defunct Pennsylvania railroads