Transportation of Food: Overview: Steamboats, Canals, and Railroads

In the nineteenth century the urban population was growing rapidly and needed food transported from the countryside. Time was ripe for a transportation revolution, a revolution that was eventually to see trains, planes, and automobiles transporting food all around America.

Before trains came steamboats. The first successful trial of the steamboat was on the Delaware River in 1787, and thirty years later the boats were running on the Mississippi. Able to ship both upstream and downstream and faster, less expensive, and safer than the flatboats that had been the chief means of river transportation, steamboats greatly enhanced the ability to transport perishable agricultural goods. At immense cost to the environment—consumption of firewood by steamboats is said to have been the primary cause of riparian deforestation in the first half of the nineteenth century—market production and commodity flows spread west. With political support for building food transportation networks increasing, the era of canal building began.