I live in a rural state, although admittidly, in the state’s largest city that includes 20%+ of the population. South Dakota has lost a lot of railroad lines over the last 50 years as CNW, The Tootin’ Louie, The Milwaukee Road, The Rock Island and The Illinois Central pulled up a lot of rails.
It seems like every little town that lost their railroad lost their economic lifeline to the rest of the world. Since their railroad lines left, they all seem to be slowly reverting back to being prairie.
Did the railroad go away because the towns dried up, or did the town dry up because the railroad was taken away? How is it in other states? Is losing the railroad the kiss of death for a small, rural town?
Answering that question really relies on knowing how intertwined the railroad and the town were.
If the railroad left because the traffic dried up, that’s one consideration.
Many towns that never had a railroad in the first place have dried up and blown away as well. Probably the top reason is mobility. Kids (especially) can easily pick up and move away. Granted, they always have, but today it seems more like the expected thing to do. Which means nobody is left in the old home town.
Mobility applies to other things, too, like crops to market. There are semi’s on the road today that carry more than some boxcars. So the freight traffic left, too.
In the end, I’m sure there are some trends that can be identified, and the reason for some rail lines coming out, and some towns becoming ghost towns may be obvious, but we may never have a definitive, one-fits-all answer.
Great topic that gets to the heart of things. It is something we have all seen happen and sold to us as “progress”. The solid foundation of smaller communities and even much larger ones, while not dependent on the railroad, relied on the link…it was always there through good and bad and always solid, real. It had a spiritual presence that lived in the townsfolk. Once these links starting to sever the chain itself lost its strength and it went even faster. Economists and politicians, or just plain folk can site statistics and numbers and try to and will rationalize the reasons for the railroad tearing up its tracks and abandonment of towns and lines but it’s like losing all hopes and aspirations for the here and now, something permanent, something real. My own feeling of great loss came from the NYC Canada Southern (CASO) and the parallel lines of its competitors Wabash and Pere Maquette and all the branch lines. Once gone these towns, some substantial in importance and size, from Windsor to Niagara Falls ( Detroit to Buffalo) all of them, saw pretty obvious serious state of declines to anyone. Replaced by trucks? A better future? More efficient? Less expensive, or as everyone and their dog says “cheaper”? You can lose weight by cutting out a pound of flesh but it will likely kill you. My take is we have lost too much, we would be better with what we had, to make it work because it must, because it is vital.
I think there are two versions. One covers the eastern half of the country, the other the western half. I’ve not read either, but have always wanted to. Just haven’t gotten around to it.
I think in earlier times, before the major carriers became wholesalers of transportation and still worked the small towns and their industries, it was the kiss of death. The towns were already in decline. The loss of rail service the tipping point.
Maybe not so much today. Today for most towns, unless they have a major industry, rail service is irrelevant. The trains pass through but don’t work any remaining industry. If there even is any.
Now in Iowa, the Des Moines Register when reporting on school consolidation, says losing the school is the kiss of death. For many places it’s the last large employer and the identity of the town.
If you can find it, the book “Plains Country Towns” by John C. Hudson (Copyright 1985 by University of Minnesota Press) is well worth reading. Hudson, a Northwestern University professor of geography, studied the development and decline of a large area of North Dakota that included Minot.
The key idea to keep in mind is that rural towns in the midwest didn’t “just happen” but were located by the railroads at a fairly uniform spacing along their lines to handle agricultural products (primarily grains) produced by farmers surrounding the towns. The distance between towns, usually five to ten miles apart (with seven miles typical) enabled a farmer using a horse-drawn wagon to make a trip to town and return in one day. So, every town, even the smallest, had elevators to handle grain. The town also provided support to area farmers with groceries (that couldn’t be grown locally; flour, sugar, coffee, etc.), lumber, coal, drygoods, blacksmithing, and banking.
Not every town developed equally, county seats were larger, some never did amount to much (poor location or lesser quality farmland), and some towns were too close to towns on competing rail lines to ever develop a real base.
This system (and it was a complete system) worked well with horse and wagon transport; it started to fail with the development of automobiles and trucks, plus the mechanization of farming. Using tractors and other mechanized equipment instead of horses enabled the farmer to farm a larger area, thus fewer farmers. Motorized transport enabled farmers to shop at larger towns farther away instead of a small local stores with limited inventory and high prices. Grain could also be hauled to other elevator locations to obtain better prices.
With bigger farm equipment and bigger trucks the process has continued, further reducing the usefulness of the local small town. While a quarter section (160 acres) was once a typically sized farm it’s not uncommon for farms in central Iowa to be 1
Not much risk of sounding like an adult after all; literally three seconds with Google will tell you ‘Minneapolis & St. Louis’ even if you didn’t get the clue from Kurt’s post.
Here’s a brief history to save your fingers a few keystrokes.
In the early 1880’s there was a town in Plymouth County Iowa called Quorn. It had a population of 300 or so and was thriving. However, when the railroad came through, a stop was located about a mile east of town, and the railroad missed Quorn entirely. The buildings of the town were moved to the station, called Kingsley. Today Kingsley is a thriving small town, but Quorn has returned to cropland except for the town cemetery.
Many areas of your part of the country were, I would guess, established before the railroads, and the railroads probably connected the dots, or replaced other forms of transportaion. I could probably sing you the chorus to a song I learned in third grade about the Erie Canal, but it’s best if I don’t sing.
On the plains, the railroads, with a few exceptions, established the towns. How do you think that difference affected how small towns faired in the northeast when rails were pulled up?
It was the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway that for some reason built a branch line west of Minneapolis ending at a no where spot in SD called Leola. It did run through a couple small cities in SD- Aberdeen and Watertown. Other than those two, there’s probably 2 or 3 towns on the line left that are big enough to even have a gas station, and perhaps a dozen more that barely rank as being a name on a map.
There appears to be considerably more to this story than you indicate. Apparently this branch was built with the express purpose of profiting from farm development, with towns being built ‘strategically spaced’ to optimize this with transportation modes as they were circa 1905. Naturally this was organized around the specific rail line as ‘spine’, not dissimilar to traction companies encouraging housing developments or amusement parks that they would primarily serve.
It’s possible the towns might have maintained viability a bit longer if the USRA had not intervened, but I suspect the writing was on the wall well before the Depression anyway. I also don’t think there was any place in Lucian Sprague’s expansion model for that sort or scale of captive business; there certainly wasn’t after the Heineman affair.
I still wonder whether there would have been a modern place for the M&St.L - TP&W route as an organized bridge line around Chicago. Of course that’s nowhere near the branch we’re discussing…
Perhaps, but 20/20 hindsight does make me wonder. I have read the above referenced book about The Tootin’ Louie. At the time the line was built, South Dakota was wide open for development. After crossing into SD, this line ran first into Watertwon, that had a couple other railroads there chasing that same ambition to be a business developer. In my mind, a lot of early endeavors like this make me think of Ralph Kramden always trying to get Norton to invest money in some scheme where they can ‘get in on the ground floor’.
From Watertown, The tootin’ Louie headed for Aberdeen. Aberdeen was called The Hub City, because railroads radiated out in every direction. Then it was off to Leola, where someone said “let’s just here”. 20/20 hindsight makes it look like IC made a wise decision to stop at Sioux Falls, and RI at Sioux Falls and Watertown on their two branch lines.
The northeast suffered from “we have to have a railroad” syndrome. Many railroads were built not because they were needed, but because it was seen as a status symbol.
Or, there were great dreams - The New York, Ontario and Western a case in point.
Many being essentially redundant even as they were built, there was less of a loss when they quit.
The small towns have suffered somewhat from improved travel opportunities - animated and fanciful as it was, “Radiator Springs” (“Cars”) was rather an accurate description of that. The kids leave, and many small communities become bedroom communities with little, if any commercial or industrial base.
The terminus’ of the O&W (Oswego, NY), Rome & Watertown (Cape Vincent, NY), and the Utica & Black River (Clayton, NY) all survive, quite well, thank you. In 1906, some 17 passenger trains terminated or originated at Clayton. The rails came up ca 1964 - late enough that an overpass had to be built over them for I-81. All of the towns along the U&BR still exist.
A different result is found in Prescott, AZ where local mining money in 1893 created a railroad connecting with the Santa Fe Transcon at Ash Fork. This line was extended to Phoenix in 1895. Phoenix was then just a small town with agriculture as its source of revenue.
Move forward sixty years and Phoenix had evolved into a major city with many types of revenue while the mountain town of Prescott had seen its mining revenue dissappear. Santa Fe, sucessor of the original RR, received ICC permission to alter its route to Phoenix and thus shortened the mileage to Phoenix by fourteen miles and lowered its maximum elevation by 1000 feet. A Branch line was left in place so that Prescott still had rail service.
But rather than ‘dry up’ Prescott prospered because of its climate and clean mountain air at 5300 feet in elevation. Prescott became a significant retirement location and remains so today. But the rail revenue from the branch line dimenished and this branch was eventually abandoned.
I read both through inter-library loan. As luck would have it, they both showed up the same day. I was disappointed. As I recall, my disappointment was that they both seemed to be simply book one of a two part series. The first book was about eastern railroads, the second about western railroads.
Each did a good job of telling the history of a town based on it’s railroad. You’d read about how Smallville was platted on the Big City & Western Railroad, and follow how both grew and prospered through boom times, depression and two world wars. Then the tracks were ripped up and the story ended.
Volume 2 would show you Smallville 5,10,25 years later, and detail the town’s reversion back to dust. It could also include details of what happened to the Big City & Western Railroad over the next few bankruptcies, mergers, track abandonments and take-overs, but that make better reading as Volume 3.
I’d add some external context, too. This wonderful boosterism didn’t exist in a vacuum; if I recall, there was a significant business downturn in 1907 that would have led to some pretty quick ‘survival of the fittest’ retrenchment to the actual best growth prospects. (And perhaps quicker than 20/20 hindsight in the absence of the ‘big picture’ prevailing at the time might have indicated…)
Many booming communities started out as a couple of dirt roads and a station, with a relative lack of cost (and perceived desirability) of surrounding environs being a factor in their success. If I remember correctly Sioux City actually built itself a sizable elevated railroad to get part of its perceived new prosperity across the reeking expanse of another part of its slightly older prosperity – 20/20 hindsight would flag this as excessive expense, but it certainly didn’t seem so at the time. Reading between the lines a bit, I think the 'powers-that-were; in charge of the bit of M&St.L development toward the outer end of the branch did not conduct, perhaps didn’t realize they had to conduct, the extended marketing and promotion activities needed to get their artificial communities to thrive, rather than just make the sales and ‘let the market do the rest’.
There is a relatively famous series of drawings that depict a grade crossing location in a particular (fictitious, I think) town over the course of many years, showing eventually how the railroad (and its associated interurban competitor) withered away and the town businesses evolved. I thought the details in this were as evocative as reams of dry prose in showing how changes can affect and effect other changes over the years. It would not be difficult (in principle, not in skill!) to draw such a series for different kinds of community; indeed, even for actual communities. My father told me that a local hardware store, when he was growing up in northern New Jersey, had a display of part of ‘downtown’ that was photographs of the same location taken about 5 years apart over a period of 60 to 70 years. And that the dramatic further changes that occurred (really starting years later) could have been easily documented just by continuing that series…
Sioux City, in Iowa 80 miles down the road was on the Missouri River and had a good steamboat transportation system that predated much of it’s railroad traffic. Sioux Falls, in South Dakota did build a set of short, interurban, electric trollylines to open up some local real estate for development. In fact, I think the lines were horse drawn at first.
It appears to me- with the ol’ 20/20 hindsight goggles on-that maybe the variuos railroad booms were a lot like our modern day Dot-Com boom. Maybe M&St.L looked around and decided they’d better jump in quick and build that line into areas before somebody else did. In the same way that the Dot-Com people jumped in with both feet and them some, the railroads must have figured it was all there waiting for somebody to realize the potential of an area. What could go wrong?