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. 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, 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,
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,
Lehigh Canal,
Schuylkill Canal and
Erie Canal and Illinois Canals all cheapened long distance shipping dramatically, spurred commerce, and enabled the
Industrial Revolution, including the production of enough iron to create railroads. 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 legislation, authorizing the
Allegheny Portage Railroad 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. In 1830, this would result in the
Camden and Amboy Railroad 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 (c.1826, o:1830), • whereas the Commonwealth of Massachusetts over chartered the Leiper Railroad's soulmate: the industrial
animal powered
Granite Railroad 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, first
steam locomotive imported into the USA, is tested along tracks built by the
Delaware and Hudson 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 from
Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania, is incorporated and construction commenced to open a second major coal field to the
Lehigh Canal 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 after the 1870s. Built two decades into the brief
American canal age, it ran about along
Crum Creek in
Delaware County to its mouth in Eastern
Pennsylvania'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. Efforts were made in the 1930s to preserve the remnants of the railroad. The
Thomas Leiper Estate was added to the
National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The Thomas Leiper House has been turned into a public museum in
Wallingford. ==See also==