Statement of Purpose

We are mapping American communication network in the late 19th and early 20th century. This mapping has the twin aim of 1) opening up new scholarly inquiry into the transformations the telegraph and railroad produced on American social, political, and economic life and 2) creating a public, interactive map of the stations and offices that are transcribed.

There exists no complete digital mapping of telegraph offices. While there are historical maps of the telegraph network, these are not exhaustive and cover a only a few select years. Similarly, while railroad lines have been digitally mapped, this has been done for a select few years for which maps exist and does not include stations where access to railroads primarily took place.

This project remedies these problem by using internal documents from American telegraph companies and the Official Guides to the Railways to identify the location of telegraph offices and railroad stations. Until recently, these records and documents existed only on paper. We have produced digital images of some of these records. Both the telegraph and railroad lists were widely used and frequently updates; to keep costs low, they were produced cheaply. The paper, ink, and printing methods were ideal for cost-savings, but not for producing clear, consistent text on the page. Moreover, to conserve space, these texts were produced using tiny fonts. The goal of Wires and Rails is to work with volunteers to preserve, transcribe, and ultimately map these documents.

Each volunteer will help create new data that will be publicly available for researchers to use in studying the social, political, and economic consequences of the telegraph and railroad and be able to see the fruit of their work as newly transcribed stations are added to an interactive map.

Initial goals

The initial goals of this project are to transcribe the following documents:

• The Index of Railway stations from the Official Guide to the Railways for each year between 1880 and 1909. Each entry in the index includes the station name and location, the companies operating there, and sometimes additional information about connections between multiple lines. Our first goal is to extract the station locations in each year, followed by In subsequent steps, we can extend this backwards in time to 1870 and potentially into the 1920s.
• Western Union Tariff books from the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s. These Tariff books listed all of a company’s offices, which offices provided special services like money orders, and some of the information needed to calculate a telegram price. In addition, books listed locations that could be reach by forwarding a telegram upon a competitor’s line. Later year tariff books indicated locations without a telegraph office that could be reach by forwarding the message by courier or a local phone call. These comprise the complete set of known extant books containing this information.

Longterm goals

Once the preliminary mapping of railroads is complete, additional projects such as digitizing railroad time tables and freight or passenger prices might become possible.