[Railroad Map of the Southeastern United States]

The railroads of the Southeast during the Gilded Age.

This huge railroad map, covering portions of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, was copyrighted by Rand McNally & Company in 1890 and published in Chicago. The rather skeletal image, largely devoid of topographic detail, captures the railway network of the Southeast during a transformative period. Following decades of incompatible gauges, tremendous efforts were made during the 1880s to standardize the region’s railroads to the national gauge of 4 feet, 8½ inches. At the same time, heavy investment added thousands of miles of track, accelerating the region’s economic and industrial development and facilitating the growth of industries ranging from timber to citrus.

Several railroads on the map illustrate this period of rapid expansion. The Macon–Valdosta–Palatka route of the Georgia Southern & Florida Railroad opened in 1890, creating a new north-south connection between Georgia and Florida. That same year, Henry Plant acquired control of the Alabama Midland Railway, incorporating it into his rapidly expanding southeastern railroad empire. His contemporary rival, Henry Flagler, was likewise assembling the network that would become the Florida East Coast Railway, which already extended south to Daytona. The extensive cluster of lines surrounding Birmingham is also notable: the young city was experiencing extraordinary industrial growth fueled by nearby deposits of iron ore, coal, and limestone. Many of the smaller railroads depicted here would eventually be absorbed into larger systems, making this map a useful snapshot of the Southeast’s fragmented railroad landscape just before a major era of consolidation.