Chartered by Maryland in 1827, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) was the first railway projected westward over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio Valley. The businessmen of Baltimore were worried about the increased western trade that New York City was gaining from the Erie Canal. They feared that the National Road could not successfully compete with either the Erie or a proposed canal system planned by Pennsylvania. The Baltimore leaders soon decided that a railroad to the West was the answer to the commercial competition from the North. Of the $3 million of capital stock issued by the company under the charter, the state of Maryland took $1 million and the city of Baltimore $500,000, while the remainder was made available to individuals and corporations. The company was organized in April 1827, and a merchant banker from Baltimore, Philip E. Thomas, was elected president. Surveying parties were sent out to seek a route to the Potomac, and the first stone for the new railroad was laid on July 4, 1828.
The first track was laid in the English standard gauge of 4 feet, 8 f/2 inches in October 1829; in May 1830 daily passenger service was started from Baltimore to Ellicotts Mills, 13 miles west of Baltimore. Horses pulled the first trains on the B&O even though some experts thought steam locomotion was practical. A small experimental steam engine, the Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, convinced the B&O directors that steam power was possible; in 1831 they ordered steam locomotives for their road. B&O officials soon learned that such locomotives could pull moderate loads up a 2-percent inclined plane, an important ability considering the mountainous terrain of western Maryland and Virginia. In fact, the multitude of engineering problems faced and solved by B&O officials was so great that D. Kimball Minor, the editor of American Railroad Journal, described the Baltimore & Ohio as the Railroad University of the United States.
The B&O reached Frederick, 61 miles west of Baltimore, late in 1831 and Harpers Ferry in 1837. A 32-mile branch to Washington, D. C., was opened in 1835. By 1836, the revenue on the 84-mile Main Stem to Harpers Ferry was $281,000, more than 40 percent of which came from passenger service.
Under the presidency of Louis McLane (1836-48) much of the original line of the B&O was upgraded, and the line was pushed westward to Cumberland. Late in 1842, the line to Cumberland, the eastern terminal of the National Road 128 miles west of Baltimore, was opened to service. Important coal mines were located in the Cumberland area, and by 1848 coal moving to Baltimore made up 40 percent of eastbound tonnage. Thomas Swann, who succeeded McLane as president from 1848 to 1853, financed the building of the B&O over the mountains of Western Virginia to Wheeling by obtaining new stock subscriptions and selling bonds in England. The last rails of the new line to Wheeling were laid on December 24, 1852. Between 1851 and 1857, a second route to the Ohio River (the B&O-controlled Northwestern Virginia Railroad) was built. The 104-mile road ran from Grafton, 100 miles west of Cumberland, to Parkersburg, 90 miles downstream from Wheeling. By 1860 B&O revenue on the 379-mile main stem from Baltimore to Wheeling amounted to $4 million. The economic importance of the growing B&O was reflected in the population of the city of Baltimore, which climbed from 80,000 in 1830 to 212,000 in 1860.
John W. Garrett, a Baltimore commission merchant and banker, became the B&O president in 1858, a position he would hold until his death in 1884. He was a champion of the individual shareholder and successfully pushed for more frequent dividends on the common stock. He also ran the company during the crisis of the Civil War, which came early to the Baltimore & Ohio when John Brown stopped a B&O passenger train during his raid on the U. S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Because of its location in a border state, the B&O was destined to experience far more than its share of the violence and destruction in the Civil War. Early in the conflict Garrett spoke of the line as a “southern” railroad, but the increasing destruction of B&O property by Colonel Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson led him to speak of Confederates as “rebels.” Because of the destruction, portions of the B&O in the mountains of Virginia could not be fully restored for weeks and months at a time. In early autumn 1863 Garrett played a major role in helping to direct the rail movement of 25,000 Union troops from Washington, D. C., via the B&O and other lines in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, to the aid of General Rosencrans near Chattanooga. Throughout the war, the Baltimore & Ohio line to Washington, D. C., was the only rail connection to the nation’s capital. Despite the destruction it suffered, the B&O prospered during the war years. By 1865 annual revenue on the main stem was up to $10 million.
In the years after Civil War, John Garrett greatly expanded his railroad. In the late 1860s he started to build two giant wrought-iron bridges across the Ohio River. Between 1868 and 1873 he built the metropolitan branch northwest of Washington and linked it with the main stem near Point of Rocks. In the early 1880s Garrett began to build a line into Philadelphia.
The B&O, which was operating only 520 miles of line in 1865, had grown to a rail network of 1,700 miles by 1884. Most of the expansion had been paid for with borrowed money rather than new share capital. During the postwar years, Garrett’s railroad had engaged in several rate wars with the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and the Erie, with the final result being a general lowering of freight rates. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, operating expenses on the B&O climbed faster than the total revenue. On March 1, 1896, the Baltimore & Ohio was placed in the hands of receivers.
Further reading: Edward Hungerford, The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: 1827-1927 (New York: Putnam’s, 1928); John Stover, History of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987).
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