Of Aqueducts and Trains

I found an alluring cultural object in the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection, within American Travel Notes: Travels in America, 1750—1920. Lands of the Slave and the Free or: Cuba, the United States, and Canada is a travel narrative by the Englishman Henry A. Murray published in 1857. I’ll admit I went about this assignment somewhat backwards by simply reading the narrative and then using TokenX to zero in on related parts of Leaves of Grass.

“City and country, fire-place, candle, gas-light, heater, aqueduct”

Upon the many topics which the pleasantly rambling Lands of the Slave and the Free takes on, is the New York Croton aqueduct, which Murray describes as a considerable achievement for the region and nation.

“This stupendous work consists of a covered way seven feet broad and eight feet and a half high; in its course it has to pass through sixteen tunnellings, forming an aggregate of nearly 7,000 feet; to cross the river Harlem by a bridge 1,450 feet long and 114 feet above tide water, and to span various valleys.” (69) I supplemented my reading in Lands with a bit of ye olde wikipedia, to find that the aqueduct was constructed to serve New York City between 1837 and 1842 and was a great boon to the city, as polluted water had led to cholera and yellow fever epidemics, and the lack of a sufficient water supply led to a number of fires, culminating in the 1835 Great Fire of New York.

(“The ring of alarm bells . . . . the cry of fire . . . . the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and colored lights . . . .”)

(If you’re curious: the Croton Reservoir continued to provide water to the city until 1940, when it was drained to create the Great Lawn in Central Park, but some of the original aqueduct still exists and is the basis for today’s Old Croton Aqueduct Historic State Park.)

From New York, Murray describes train travel to the South and West. To give an idea of the flavor of this passage:

“There they were, with the red-hot stove and poisonous atmosphere, as usual; so my friend and I, selecting a cushionless “smoking-car,” where the windows would at all events be open, seated ourselves on the hard boards of resignation, lit the tapery weed of consolation and shrouded ourselves in its fragrant clouds. On we went, hissing through the snow-storm, till the waters of the Delaware brought us to a stand-still; then, changing to a steamer, we crossed the broad stream, on which to save time, they served dinner, and almost before it was ended we had reached Philadelphia.”(75)

Whitman has four references to trains in the 1855 version of the poem. Murray’s descriptions add sensual details to what it was like to embark on train travel in 1855 and what associations the idea of train travel would have for the contemporary reader.

Something else about going about exploring both Leaves of Grass and Murray’s narrative in this way: Whitman does not use many more detailed 1855 expressions and terms that I was interested in, for example, “pacers”, “trotters”, “forewheels”, and “splashboards.” Some of these may be English words not used by American contemporaries, but it also struck me how readable Whitman’s poem is to us today and how few unknown terms he uses. As I was thinking about Whitman’s poem as a relic of 1855, it was almost, I felt, as if he was resisting me, saying, “no, my poem is more universal than that,” and I began to reflect on how long-lasting the words he chose to use have been.