Download or read book Buried Dreams written by Andrew R. Black and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.
Download or read book History of the Hoosac Tunnel written by Edward Sandford Martin and published by . This book was released on 1878 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hoosac Tunnel 1862 1863 written by and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists of various reports and speeches concerning the Hoosac Tunnel, bound together in a library binding.
Download or read book History of the Hoosac Tunnel written by and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hoosac Tunnel written by Francis William Bird and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the Hoosac Tunnel written by Orson Dalrymple and published by North Adams, Mass. : O. Dalrymple. This book was released on 1879 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Builders of the Hoosac Tunnel written by Cliff Schexnayder and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [This book] traces the interactions between those who worked to build the Hoosac Tunnel of Massachusetts and those who struggled mightily to hinder its construction. The driving force behind the Tunnel and a thread through the book is Alvah Crocker, paper magistrate from Fitchburg. The first to broach the idea of tunneling the Mountain is the father of American Civil Engineering, Loammi Baldwin Jr., son of the Revolutionary War hero and builder of the Middlesex Canal, Loammi Sr. There is a parade of builders: Herman Haupt, who during the Civil War earned a reputation as Lincoln's railroad man, engineers Thomas Doane and John Brooks, who pushed China merchant turned railroad man John M. Forbes' railroads into Iowa before the Civil War, and finally the Shanly brothers from Canada who achieved daylight through the Mountain. --Publisher.
Download or read book Hoosac Tunnel 1865 1868 written by and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists of various reports and speeches concerning the Hoosac Tunnel, bound together in a library binding.
Download or read book A Pinprick of Light written by Carl R. Byron and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hoosac Tunnel written by and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists of various reports and speeches concerning the Hoosac Tunnel, bound together in a library binding.
Download or read book Facts and Figures Concerning the Hoosac Tunnel written by John J. Piper and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hoosac Tunnel written by Massachusetts. General Court. Joint Committee on Troy and Greenfield Railroad Company and published by Boston : Thurston, Torry, and Emerson. This book was released on 1853 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hoosac Tunnel Route Compared with the Western Railroad written by Alfred R. Field and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How to Pay for the Hoosac Tunnel written by Edward Atkinson and published by . This book was released on 1873 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hoosac Tunnel and Troy and Greenfield Rail Road written by Daniel Lester Harris and published by . This book was released on 1862 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Report on the Hoosac Tunnel and Troy and Greenfield Railroad written by Massachusetts. General Court. Joint Committee on Troy and Greenfield Railroad Company and published by . This book was released on 1867 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Report of the Joint Special Committee on the Hoosac Tunnel and Troy and Greenfield Railroad written by Massachusetts. General Court Joint Special Committee on the Hoosac Tunnel and Troy and Greenfield Railroad and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: