Paxson—Early Railways of the Old Northwest. 245 
systems, east or west. Much more scholarly than Bingwalt was 
Henry V. Poor, whose long experience as editor of the Ameri¬ 
can Railroad Journal 2 had specially qualified him to write the 
intelligent “Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the International 
Improvements, and of the Internal Commerce, of the United 
States,” in the introduction to his fourteenth annual Manual 
of the Railroads of the United States . 3 But although here, as 
throughout the other volumes of the Manual he gave many 
figures of construction, he failed to present a comprehensive 
view of the whole subject. 
In the absence of compilations showing the geographic back¬ 
ground of railroad extension, it has been necessary to go di¬ 
rectly to detailed local sources for the history of the railways of 
the Old Northwest. Most valuable of all these is the file of the 
American Railroad Journal , whose editor read with care the 
newspapers of the United States, and clipped from them! frag¬ 
mentary paragraphs from which can be assembled contemporary 
evidence for the construction of nearly every railroad of the 
United States. The indexes to the Journal are so imperfect 
that it has often been necessary to turn the pages of volume 
after volume, but the facts desired have generally been found. 
Not only local accounts of building and opening are found here, 
but large numbers of railroad reports are reprinted in full or in 
digest. 
Next to the continuous file of the American Railroad Journal , 
come the actual annual reports of the presidents and directors 
of the several companies. The burden of making detailed re- 
2 For several years prior to 1860, the American Railroad Journal 
published, in its first number for January, a table of existing mile¬ 
age, tabulated by states. 
3 Poor, H. V., Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1881. 
Fourteenth Annual Number (New York, 1881). Henry V. 
Poor became editor of the American Railroad Journal in 1849. This 
periodical had been started as a weekly in 1832 by D. K. Minor, and 
was now continued by Poor until 1862. The outgrowth of his edi¬ 
torial experience was the announcement by Poor of his intention to 
publish a history of American railways. In 1860 he published Vol. I 
of his “History of Railroads and Canals of the United States of Amer¬ 
ica,” covering the New England and Middle States. The second vol¬ 
ume on the South, and the third, on the West, failed to appear, and 
Poor did not revert to his main intention until 1868 when he brought 
out the first of the annual volumes which are still continued under 
his name. He was born in 1812 and died in 1905. 
