The history of the first locomotives in America. From original ...

FIRST TKUCK-ENGINE. 319
and OMo Railroad, at a banquet given in Wheeling in
1853, on tlie successful completion of tliat great enter-
prise :
!
" With your permission, Mr. President, I will read, as my text
for what I propose to say, the following extract from the Virginia
Gazette, published in 1836: 'The Baltimore and Ohio Wagon
Company, with a capital of two hundred thousand dollars (onefourth
of which is paid in), transport goods and produce between
Wheeling and Baltimore. One wagon departs and arrives daily
from each of these places, with a load weighing from two and a
quarter to two and a half tons, and occupying eight days upon the
road, and arrangements are in progress to increase the number of
daily arrivals and departures, from one to three wagons, and event-
ually to five.'
" Were a new edition to be prepared for the Virginia Gazette,
and the paragraph relating to the intercourse of the two cities,
Wheeling and Baltimore, to be placed side by side, how modest
would appear to have been the conception of its author, only sixteen
years ago
" The arrangements to which we refer, carried out by a differ-
ent corApany it is true, but still the arrangements, uniting Wheeling
and Baltimore, have resulted in the existence of a company
with a capital of twelve million dollars, all of which has been paid
in ; having in charge a work which, when completed and stocked,
as it is intended that it shall be, will represent a capital of about
twenty million dollars, and whose preparations, so soon as the
delays attending the first use of all good public works shall have
been surmounted, will insure the daily transportation, between the
Ohio and Baltimore, of a thousand tons of goods and produce
in the space of thirty-six hours now, and who can tell how much
faster ere a few years have been added to the less than the quarter
of a century just referred to.
" Why, Mr. President, the weight of the tonnage-engine alone
used by this railroad company almost equals the weight of the
five loads that limited the hopes of the wagon company, teams,
wagons, and all ; and behind this engine there rolls at the uni-
form speed of twelve miles an hour three hundred tons of gross
weight, one-half of which is the exchange which the Western
valleys send to the cities of the Atlantic border. We talk of the
course of empire. Its type is the locomotive and its train, whose
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