The history of an area can often be developed around its transportation systems, or lack of them. Montgomery, Alabama, has been fortunate in that its story hinges very much on the means by which goods and people have come into and been moved through the region. The Federal Road, part of a system of connecting links between Washington and New Orleans, provided the way for settlers to move into the fertile cotton lands nestled along the great bend of the Alabama River, a stream which meandered for over 400 miles on its way to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The establishment of two villages in the vicinity of the Big Bend, New Philadelphia and East Alabama Town, led to the incorporation of the town of Montgomery by the Alabama Territorial Legislature in December 1819. While the Federal Road did not pass through Montgomery, a branch of it led to the aspiring young town. As a trade and transportation center for the developing farms and plantations, the new town, with its easy access to the River, began to prosper and with the coming of the steamboat Harriett on October 22, 1821, a new era began with traffic moving much faster, taking cotton to market and bringing goods for Montgomery’s merchants, planters and farmers.

"Although an asphalt parking lot has replaced the tracks that ran under the Union Station shed, one can still hear the morning whistles and clanks of freight trains coming and going around this bend of the Alabama River. And the ghosts of trains past are not hard to imagine." Credits: Andrew Waldo/Old Alabama Rails Collection

Steam as a motive power triggered much thought, and by the mid-1820s, engineers in England were already utilizing it as a means to move cars along rails. Word of this miraculous innovation spread quickly, and by 1831, Alabama planters had a railroad in operation from Courtland to Decatur on the Tennessee River. Interestingly enough, entrepreneurs first viewed the railroad as a means of connecting inland communities and plantations to rivers and steamboat transportation. Little did these people realize that eventually railroads would eliminate steamboats as a means of travel and communication.