The invisible railroad in Adams County (part 1)

[image error]Look at a map of the railroads through Gettysburg. They go north, east, and west, but no tracks head south toward Maryland.

Yet, there could have been a route from Gettysburg to the Potomac River in Maryland. It was a winding path that made its way over South Mountain. It was planned to be the Gettysburg Extension of the Pennsylvania Main Line, but its twists and turns earned it the nickname “The Tapeworm.”

“It’s the first railroad that got very far,” according to Bradley Hoch, author of Thaddeus Stevens in Gettysburg: The Making of an Abolitionist.

“Far” is a relative term in this context because no train ever traveled on the Tapeworm, and no rails were ever laid. However, the route was surveyed and graded in Adams County, which is further than two earlier railroads got.

Railroads in Adams County

In the early decades of the 19th century, the railroad was the newest mode of transportation. Though a new technology, it held a lot of promise. You could travel faster than a wagon on a toll road, and you weren’t dependent on a steady flowing water source like a canal.

The construction of the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railroad in 1827 showed the country how useful railroads could be. The following year, the more ambitious Baltimore and Ohio Railroad broke ground in Baltimore.

“The Pennsylvania legislature chartered seventeen railroads in the next three years, and in the 1830s authorized 136 more lines – only 20 percent of which were actually built. Every community, it seemed, believed that prosperity was just around the corner – if only a railroad came its way,” according to ExplorePAHistory.com.

State representative Thaddeus Stevens and the Adams County business community also thought that way. “Thaddeus Stevens and Adams County wanted to jump on the bandwagon because they saw the railroad as a means of economic development for the area,” Hoch said.

[image error]Thaddeus Stevens

Stevens, a Gettysburg lawyer, would eventually become known as a staunch abolitionist and a supporter of free education. He had shown that he wasn’t opposed to some “sleight of hand and skullduggery” to get what he wanted. He was first elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1833, and he began working towards getting a railroad to come through Adams County, no matter what it took.

When the Second National Bank in Philadelphia was seeking a state charter to stay viable, the bank was willing to pay the commonwealth a lot of money to ensure that it happened. When the charter came before Stevens’ committee in the state legislature, he had written into it that the Canal Committee would survey a railroad from Gettysburg to a location west of Williamsport, Maryland, where it would connect to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Also, he had added that the bank would pay $200,000 for this.

“Stevens was able to weasel $200,000 out of the bank and the legal authority to spend it on a railroad,” Hoch said.

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