The Hoosac railroad
tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a
nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the
Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest
tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took
nearly twenty-five years (1851?1875), almost two hundred casualties, and
tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its
grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is
little known today. Andrew R. Black's Buried Dreams refreshes
public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude
and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its
completion, and the factors that inhibited its success.
Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state
disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to
succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state's
efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the
strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern
Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post?Erie
Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the
competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad
boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national
politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War
heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was
finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given
birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated
economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the
tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company.
Buried Dreams tells a story of America's reckoning with the
perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature
to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.