THE FARMER'S WAR AGAINST MONOPOLIES. 29 



clined planes and intervening levels up the mountain 

 on one side, then by a long level to the five inclined 

 planes and levels which terminated below at Johns- 

 town, where another canal took the boats that had 

 been brought over the mountain in sections, and con- 

 veyed them to Pittsburg. The canals and inclined 

 planes were done away with, and a continuous road 

 was opened across the State." This was the now 

 famous Pennsylvania Central Railroad. Connections 

 were pushed out from it to Lake Erie at Cleveland, to 

 Chicago, and by way of Columbus and Cincinnati, with 

 the railroads of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. 



" Baltimore, feeling the effects of these advances, was 

 impelled to push forward the Baltimore and Ohio road, 

 which had long stopped in the coal region of Cumber- 

 land, and it was at last completed to Wheeling on the 

 Ohio. Charleston and Savannah early appreciated the 

 importance of connecting their harbors with the pro- 

 ductive districts of the interior by railroads ; and when 

 these had penetrated their own States, the line of equal 

 importance to both was extended through North 

 Georgia into Tennessee, connecting, in 1849, Chatta- 

 nooga with those cities. 



" All these advances into the valleys of the branches 

 of the Mississippi affected the cities of the Gulf of 

 Mexico, and Mobile and New Orleans hastened forward 

 the lines which in the early history of American rail- 

 roads they had projected for securing to themselves the 

 trade of these valleys." 



In the Western States the growth of the railway 

 system was not less marked than in the East. In 1838 

 there were but 22 miles of railway in operation in the 

 West, and this in the State of Kentucky. Four years 



