Great Railway Station at Chicago – Departure of a Train

Chicago’s 19th-century diversity, visualized.

This action-packed woodcut view was originally drawn by Thomas Hogan and published in 1872 as a supplement to Appleton’s Journal. The frenetic scene depicts a crowded train station in Chicago, highlighting the diverse assortment of people that could be seen there. Busy porters, well-dressed aristocrats, soldiers, frontiersmen, youth baseball players, Native Americans, and weary immigrants all share the platform. From Chicago History Resources,

“This illustration from a national periodical, Appleton’s Journal, provides an idea of the scale and variety of human movement in and out of Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. The range of social types depicted here gives a good sense of the cultural mix in Chicago. Both a fashionably dressed family and a trapper conversing with Indians occupy the center of the image. There is little explicit indication, however, of how many people getting on and off these trains were foreign-born.”

The image is also representative of the city’s industrious residents and its spectacular economic vitality; having rebuilt much of the commercial district that was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1871 (only the year before printing).

Source: Chicago History Resources.