![]() James Watt's improvements in the steam engine were adapted by John Fitch in 1787 to propel a ship on the Delaware River, and by James Rumsey in the same year on the Potomac River. These early uses of railways gave little hint that a revolution in methods of transportation was underway. It used horsepower to haul granite needed for building the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, four miles to the wharf on the Neponset River. In 1826 a commercial tramroad was surveyed and constructed at Quincy, Massachusetts, by Gridley Bryant, with the machinery for it developed by Solomon Willard. In 1873 the younger Thomson donated his father's 1809 map to the Delaware County Institute of Science to substantiate the claim that the map and Leiper's railroad were the first such work in North America. He was the father of the famous civil engineer and longtime president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, John Edgar Thomson, who was himself a mapmaker. Thomson was a notable land surveyor who earlier had worked with the Holland Land Company. Using his survey map, Thomson helped Reading Howell, the project engineer and a well-known mapmaker, construct the first practical wooden tracks for a tramroad. From His Stone Saw-Mill and Quarries on Crum Creek to His Landing on Ridley Creek." Thomas Leiper was a wealthy Philadelphia tobacconist and friend of Thomas Jefferson, who owned stone quarries near Chester. the Railroad as Contemplated by Thomas Leiper Esq. The earliest survey map in the United States that shows a commercial "tramroad" was drawn in Pennsylvania in October 1809 by John Thomson and was entitled "Draft Exhibiting. These lines were originally intended for horse drawn trains. This is the earliest topographic strip map in the Library showing a railroad survey. Right Half of James Hayward's 1828 plan of a survey for the proposed Boston and Providence Railway. Privately owned toll or turnpike roads were followed first by steamships on the navigable rivers and by the construction of canals and then in the 1830s by the introduction of railroads for steam-powered trains. The settlement of the frontier, the development of agriculture, and the exploitation of natural resources generated a demand for new ways to move people and goods from one place to another. Surveying and mapping activities flourished in the United States as people began moving inland over the inadequately mapped continent. John Montressor, a British engineer known to students of historical cartography as a mapmaker. The first North American "gravity road," as it was called, was erected in 1764 for military purposes at the Niagara portage in Lewiston, New York. ![]() Railways were introduced in England in the seventeenth century as a way to reduce friction in moving heavily loaded wheeled vehicles. Listen to this page The Beginnings of American Railroads and Mapping
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