The 1860s were a pivotal point not only in the development of the railroad system in the United States, but also in the creation of a modern economy from coast to coast. In the wake of the Civil War, “Reconstruction” occupied the time and attention of much of the country—an era that officially ended in 1877. But the construction of transcontinental railroads fueled innovation in creosote treatment so that tracks could last decades and national forests would not be depleted. Creosote-treated crossties helped create the first nation-wide railroads, which still underpin the country’s transportation and communications infrastructure today.
In the final decades of the 19th century railroads extended like veins to the newest part of the nation, reaching from the Midwest to the Pacific coast and nourishing the Union’s newest cities and states with travel and transport. The first “transcontinental” railroad to link the East Coast’s rail network to the new West Coast was completed by the Central Pacific in 1869. Celebrated by the famous Golden Spike ceremony, 690 miles of new railroad track connected Sacramento, the capital of the new State of California, with the existing Union Pacific railway at Promontory Summit, UT.
Grenville Mellen Dodge, a railroad engineer who started surveying land as a boy, led the way. After earning his civil engineering degree from Norwich University, he worked for the Illinois Central surveying team, where he met a railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Dodge went on to serve under Ulysses S. Grant as a major general in the U.S. Army during the Civil War, but upon its conclusion returned to his love for railroads. As Union Pacific’s Chief Engineer, he treated the task of uniting the country through railroads with military precision, taking control of his crew as if they were a military brigade, setting records for the number of miles of track laid in a day.
Following this achievement, points all along the West coast wanted to be connected to the East via rail. Transcontinental east-west routes, as well as short lines running between them, cropped up at a breakneck pace, integrating cities and states across the new American West with the rest of the United States. In just five years after the first transcontinental route was finished, 29,077 miles of railroad tracks were built, largely for additional transcontinental routes:
- 1869: Pacific Railroad: Central Pacific and Union Pacific (Promontory Summit, UT, to Sacramento, CA) 690 miles of track
- 1870: Kansas Pacific Railway 639 miles of track (Kansas City, MO, to Denver, CO)
- 1883: Southern Pacific Railroad Sunset Route: 1,995 miles of track (New Orleans, LA, to Los Angeles, CA)
- 1883: Denver & Rio Grande (D&RG) 771 miles of track (Denver, CO, to Ogden, UT)
- 1883: Northern Pacific Railway 6,800 miles of track (Ashland, WI, to Portland, OR)
- 1893: Great Northern Railway 8,316 miles of track (St. Paul, MN, to Seattle, WA)
Coast-to-Coast Freight and Communications
Thanks to these large extensions of the nation’s railway system, western settlers were no longer isolated from the rest of the country. California’s large wheat farms could ship their wheat to all corners of the U.S., kicking off the commercial farming dominance that the only 20-year-old state would maintain for more than a century to come. Mining and forestry operations could ship their raw timber and metals to the rest of the country, fueling manufacturing in the cities of the Midwest and East Coast.
In turn, the burgeoning population of California could improve their quality of life by accessing a variety of finished products which were only manufactured in the industrialized parts of the country. Data prior to 1910 is scarce, but by 1920, the transcontinental railroad network carried a diversified mix of freight, including 110,840 carloads of agricultural products, 24,595 carloads of animals, 712,155 carloads of mining products, and 100,765 carloads of forest products per year (1).
By the turn of the 20th century, it was not only goods and people which could travel west faster than ever before—so could messages. In 1860, the horses from the Pony Express were the fastest way to send letters, newspapers and telegrams to settlers out west, although the rest of the country had enjoyed telegraph connectivity since the late 1830s. The fleet of 500 high-speed horses using 190 way-stations carried messages from Missouri to Sacramento, CA.
But the service only lasted 18 months. Only two days after the first transcontinental telegraph infrastructure was completed by Western Union in 1861 in Salt Lake City, UT, connecting lines from the Pacific Telegraph Company (East) and the Overland Telegraph Company (West), the Pony Express shut down. Just seven years later, Alexander Graham Bell upgraded the entire country when he invented the telephone in 1876, a service which would use the same wood infrastructure as the earlier telegraph. The telephone made communication instantaneous, although telephones were only located in central locations rather than homes and required switchboards to operate.
The demand for and manufacture of creosote-treated wood grew throughout the 20th century. For crossties alone, creosote-treatment went from representing 43% of all ties in 1920 to 97.5% in 1957. Not only did creosote extend the life of wooden crossties, but in doing so it also preserved the supply of U.S. timber.
More People and More Creosote
These massive railroad and communication infrastructure projects drove demand for lumber that would last. Wooden infrastructure needed to be strong enough to support critical and resilient enough to withstand all manner of environmental conditions. As creosote-treating wood became more popular, scientists and engineers studied ways of improving it, resulting in two “empty-cell” processes, which used less preservative in the pressure-treatment process with the same results. The Rueping Process, invented in 1902, and the Lowry Process, invented in 1906, both made creosote treatment more economical, lowering the cost of manufacturing wood ties.
As the U.S. continued to incorporate California and the rest of its new western states into the national infrastructure network, creosote-treated crossties became the material of choice. The demand for and manufacture of creosote-treated wood grew throughout the 20th century. For crossties alone, creosote-treatment went from representing 43% of all ties in 1920 (37,792 out of a total of 86,829) to 97.5% in 1957 (24,497 out of a total of 25,123) (1). Not only did creosote extend the life of wooden crossties, but in doing so it also preserved the supply of U.S. timber. By the early 1900s, railroads used one-fifth of the nation’s supply of timber, and “the largest single use was for crossties.” (2) As Martin Meiske stated in “Tracing Creosote’s Legacy”: “Sherry Olson shows that U.S. railroads, major consumers of wood, played a pivotal role in addressing the threat of timber shortages since the 1880s. They invested in research that led to new chemical preservatives, innovative engineering designs, and improved standards” (3).
Further solidifying the important role of California in the national economy, specifically the role of its Pacific coast, was the construction of a deep-water harbor in Los Angeles, beginning in 1899. Using $3.9 million in federal funds, California transformed its San Pedro Port, a shallow natural bay used by Spanish since the 16th century, into the deep-water Port of Los Angeles that it is today. The infrastructure project constructed 8,500 feet of breakwater which enabled the port to receive the largest military and container vessels and facilitated the construction of wharfs and docks.
It is no surprise that California’s population boomed alongside this boom in construction. In 1850, the new state’s population was just 92,597; in a decade that tripled to 379,994. By the turn of the 20th century, it had nearly tripled again to 1.48 million residents. The transcontinental railroads extending out to the new state of California and its Pacific coast set it on a path that would lead to its becoming the largest economy in the Union, the fifth largest economy in the world, and home to more than 39 million people today.
Note: This article originally appeared in the Railway Tie Association’s Crossties Magazine.
Notes
- U.S. Census Data, Historical Statistics. Rail Transportation, Chapter Q, Series Q1-152. 1960.
- Sherry H. Olson, The Depletion Myth: A History of Railroad Use of Timber, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971
- Martin Meiske, Tracing Creosote’s Legacy: From the Rails of Europe to Unplanned Deposits, Technology and Culture, Vol. 66, No. 3, July 2025, Johns Hopkins University Press