Builders of the Hoosac Tunnel

Builders of the Hoosac Tunnel PDF Author: Cliff Schexnayder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942155072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
[This book] traces the interactions between those who worked to build the Hoosac Tunnel of Massachusetts and those who struggled mightily to hinder its construction. The driving force behind the Tunnel and a thread through the book is Alvah Crocker, paper magistrate from Fitchburg. The first to broach the idea of tunneling the Mountain is the father of American Civil Engineering, Loammi Baldwin Jr., son of the Revolutionary War hero and builder of the Middlesex Canal, Loammi Sr. There is a parade of builders: Herman Haupt, who during the Civil War earned a reputation as Lincoln's railroad man, engineers Thomas Doane and John Brooks, who pushed China merchant turned railroad man John M. Forbes' railroads into Iowa before the Civil War, and finally the Shanly brothers from Canada who achieved daylight through the Mountain. --Publisher.

Builders of the Hoosac Tunnel

Builders of the Hoosac Tunnel PDF Author: Cliff Schexnayder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942155072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
[This book] traces the interactions between those who worked to build the Hoosac Tunnel of Massachusetts and those who struggled mightily to hinder its construction. The driving force behind the Tunnel and a thread through the book is Alvah Crocker, paper magistrate from Fitchburg. The first to broach the idea of tunneling the Mountain is the father of American Civil Engineering, Loammi Baldwin Jr., son of the Revolutionary War hero and builder of the Middlesex Canal, Loammi Sr. There is a parade of builders: Herman Haupt, who during the Civil War earned a reputation as Lincoln's railroad man, engineers Thomas Doane and John Brooks, who pushed China merchant turned railroad man John M. Forbes' railroads into Iowa before the Civil War, and finally the Shanly brothers from Canada who achieved daylight through the Mountain. --Publisher.

Buried Dreams

Buried Dreams PDF Author: Andrew R. Black
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807174092
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.

Builders of Our Nation

Builders of Our Nation PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Hoosac Tunnel 1862-1863

Hoosac Tunnel 1862-1863 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hoosac Tunnel (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Consists of various reports and speeches concerning the Hoosac Tunnel, bound together in a library binding.

National Car and Locomotive Builder

National Car and Locomotive Builder PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Building

Building PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 642

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The American Builder

The American Builder PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Building Big

Building Big PDF Author: David Macaulay
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395963319
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Companion volume to PBS series which originally aired October 2000.

The Tunnel under the Lake

The Tunnel under the Lake PDF Author: Benjamin Sells
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810134756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The Tunnel under the Lake recounts the gripping story of how the young city of Chicago, under the leadership of an audacious engineer named Ellis Chesbrough, constructed a two-mile tunnel below Lake Michigan in search of clean water. Despite Chicago's location beside the world’s largest source of fresh water, its low elevation at the end of Lake Michigan provided no natural method of carrying away waste. As a result, within a few years of its founding, Chicago began to choke on its own sewage collecting near the shore. The befouled environment, giving rise to outbreaks of sickness and cholera, became so acute that even the ravages and costs of the U.S. Civil War did not distract city leaders from taking action. Chesbrough's solution was an unprecedented tunnel five feet in diameter lined with brick and dug sixty feet beneath Lake Michigan. Construction began from the shore as well as the tunnel’s terminus in the lake. With workers laboring in shifts and with clay carted away by donkeys, the lake and shore teams met under the lake three years later, just inches out of alignment. When it opened in March 1867, observers, city planners, and grateful citizens hailed the tunnel as the "wonder of America and of the world." Benjamin Sells narrates in vivid detail the exceptional skill and imagination it took to save this storied city from itself. A wealth of fascinating appendixes round out Sells’s account, which will delight those interested in Chicago history, water resources, and the history of technology and engineering.

The Earth Mover

The Earth Mover PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Earthmoving machinery
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description