Genealogy and Local History Blog

Category: Transportation

Genealogy / Local History / Transportation

The Cotton Belt Railroad Comes to Grapevine

To most Americans in the late nineteenth century, the railroads looked like the key to prosperity and progress. Without the market access the railroads provided, there would have been little point in raising cotton in small-town Grapevine. Wagon freight rates averaged one dollar per 100 pounds per 100 miles. After 1879, rail freight rates were never more than one-half that expensive. Since Grapevine was not too far from major economic centers, it seemed destined to have a railroad. In 1888, the St. Louis, Arkansas, and Texas Railway (SLA&T) built its Cotton Belt line through Grapevine, thus allowing Grapevine to thrive as an agricultural trade center supplying goods to area farmers and serving as a shipping point for their produce. The SLA&T originated in Tyler, Texas in 1870. Influential Grapevine businessmen urged the railroad company to build what became known as the Cotton Belt Route through Grapevine in 1887, inaugurating service...

Genealogy / Transportation

“The Most Convenient Wayes”: Travel and Transportation by Land in Early America

A “‘most howling wilderness’” was an essential outline of conditions under which the people of America, from the earliest English settlement until shortly before the Revolution, in those days, and for long afterward, lived and moved about early America. Travel was done on foot, on horseback, by wagon, or by boat. (Fig. 1) Water routes were used whenever possible; horses were useless except near settlements or on beaten paths. Extended journeys often had to be on foot. The land was so vast, full of Native Americans and wild animals, that for more than a century and a half, the white population hugged a little strip of seacoast 150 miles wide, from north to south. Most of our knowledge about colonial and early American travel has been pieced together from fragments such as diaries, personal letters, and travel accounts by domestic and foreign travelers. Many include motives for the first travel...