Created by:
Kim Frederick (Concord Academy), 2019 Carolyn A. Lynch Summer Teacher Fellow at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center

In the Antebellum Period (1820–1860) the United States was growing: in geographical size; in population; in transportation networks; in economic activity; in productivity.

This Map Set will help students explore the ways that industrialization, transportation, and expansion led to the growth of cities across the United States. As the American economy increasingly enmeshed the North, the South, and the West, the United States became increasingly urbanized.

But not all urban growth was the same. In some places, existing cities grew and changed in nature. But in many places, cities were built as urban spaces from their inception on rural farmlands, along railroads or canals, and lands that had recently been taken from Native nations.  This Map Set will consider four cities that grew in the Antebellum period: Lowell, Massachusetts; New Orleans, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; and San Francisco, California.

Of the four cities, only New Orleans existed as a city before the Antebellum period. Lowell, Chicago, and San Francisco were all built as cities on sites that had little in the way of urban development. All four grew because of the combination of industrialization, immigration, the development of transportation networks, and the American belief in its own self-creation as a nation.

There is a full series of lessons and readings that accompany this map set. To access them or for more information, please email info@leventhalmap.org.

This chart lists major cities from the highest to the lowest populations, from New York City to Trenton, New Jersey. Each column to the right features data from an earlier census. A line traces the rise and fall of the city’s population over time. For example, note that New York City has had the highest population since the nation’s first census in 1790. Chicago, in contrast, was not even considered a major city until 1850. The Midwestern hub grew rapidly to become the second largest city by 1890.

By 1850, Lowell's population topped 33,000 people, up from under 7,000 in 1830. The growth was seen in both the building out of industrial plants and canal systems as well as the creation of the infrastructure of urban life.

Particularly notable are the infill of industrial buildings and the build up in areas outlying from the canals. No longer could Lowell be described as the "Machine in the Garden." Town fathers instead came to consider how they could build parks and other natural features into the city, the proverbial Garden in the Machine.

The "Contemplated Canal," depicted in the 1830 map, has been built and the planned factory buildings encircle it. Additionally, every available space along the canals has been apportioned to one corporation or another.

Similarly, residential and commercial properties have fanned out from the main factory sections of town, expanding into Belvedere Village, across the Concord River to the southeast of Lowell proper,  and the land to the west of the industrial district that came to be known as "The Acre."

In this 1834 map, Chicago is platted out into lots designed for land speculation and sale, covering about 2.5 square miles. Harriet Martineau, a visitor to Chicago in 1836, remarked on the undeveloped nature of the city. She wrote, "Chicago looks raw and bare, standing on high prairie above the lake-shore. The houses appeared all insignificant, and run up in various directions, without any principle at all." So, even as plans were made for where a city should be, it was more anticipated than built.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Chicago experienced phenomenal growth. In 1840 there were fewer than 5000 Chicagoans. By 1860 there were over 112,000. The population growth was reflected in the geographic growth of the city, which expanded 4-5 miles to the north, south, and west. Development proceeded out of the central city along radial roads; nodes of speculative land development can be seen to the northwest and southwest of the city.

The development of cities to the west of Chicago and the Mississippi River was largely the result of constructing railways across the continent. As railroads criss-crossed the West, cities grew to serve the railways.

The federal government encouraged rail expansion, to the great consternation of Democrats and other champions of the small farmer, who saw cessions of land to the railroad companies as a pilfering of the public trust for private interests. The objection was not that the government should keep that land for all Americans, nor that Native people had been dispossessed of their lands, but that it should "be kept as homesteads for actual settlers." Even as they protested the land grants to railroads, which arguably served some public good as economic stimulus and an expansion of transportation, they pressed for that land to be given over to private hands and private use. Their ideal was a Jeffersonian agrarianism, but the establishment of the railroads pointed to a future in which there would more likely be cities, and in which city life would dominate the culture and politics of the nation. The struggle over how the West would be settled was thus a struggle between those who saw a cosmopolitan and urban future versus those who sought to maintain an agrarian American life. 

The discovery of gold changed everything for San Francisco. The plan for the city by 1849 was ambitious and organized for speculation. Despite being platted over hilly ground, the plan for the city of San Francisco took no notice of natural features and, instead, centered a road along the peninsula directly to the harbor with several different, conflicting grid systems.

While this plan was not yet built when this map was made--it is a surveyor's map that shows areas to be filled in along the harbor--it acknowledges what was already under way: the rapid growth of the city.

William M. Eddy, Sylvester W. Higgins, and C. B. Graham. Official map of San Francisco, compiled from the field notes of the official re-survey made by William M. Eddy, surveyor of the town of San Francisco, California. 1849.

By 1859, San Francisco had built out much of the central city area, growing by leaps and bounds in the typical fashion of a western boom town: through land speculation and massive immigration. This map shows both the ways that the port was built out and the unfinished nature of the port--with the western half completed and the eastern half still unfilled and ungridded. The unfinished nature is something that contemporary observers saw as characteristic of the city, and one could say, western boom towns in general.

The focus on San Francisco as a terminal point for railroad construction is reflected in this map from the 1870s, noting "Distances from San Francisco" in the lower right-hand box. Train travel cut the distance between San Francisco and Sacramento from 125 miles by water to 83 miles by water and train via Vallejo. More importantly, the rail connection meant that San Francisco was connected for both communication--the telegraph came with the railways--and transportation. No longer would the journey by boat around South America or across the Central American isthmus be necessary to reach the East.