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If you wanted to go anywhere in the 1800's, you sometimes had to put a good deal of preparation into your travel plans. Transportation in the 19th century was often limited to foot, horse and buggy, boat or train. If you were only going to travel a couple miles or so, you might have just walked. If you were traveling a bit farther, say five or ten miles into town, you would have ridden a horse, or gone by horse and buggy. But if you were going to take a really long trip -say from Ushers Ferry to Iowa City-you probably would have taken a train. |
Now you might not think that traveling from Ushers Ferry to Iowa City is a very long trip. It's only 45 miles after all! But for people who lived here a hundred years ago, 45 miles was a very long trip indeed. Most people traveled by horse and buggy, and the most miles a person could travel in a day with a horse and wagon was about twenty or thirty miles -if the roads were good. Unfortunately, most roads were not good. They twisted around curves and up over hills, they were often muddy and rutted, making it very hard for the horse to pull a wagon along them, and slowing travel even further. In fact, when Henry Usher first came from Iowa City to Cedar Rapids with his wagon and a team of horses in the 1850's it took him nearly a week to get here!
That is why most people took the train when making such long trips. It was the fastest way to travel as most trains could travel up to 60 miles an hour or more! By the 1920's, nearly every little town had a railroad Depot, and there was no place in Iowa that was more than 8 miles away from a railroad.
Rail service was very important to a small town like Ushers Ferry. In addition to passenger service, the railroad also brought the mail and offered a public telegraph service before telephones became common. Trains delivered large freight items like furniture and building materials that had to be ordered from distant places, and hauled farmer's grain and livestock to far off markets like Chicago, where they could get more money for their produce.
To take a train trip required a little planning. Most small towns only had a train depot, with one track that traveled either North-South or East-West. If you lived in a town with an East-West track and wanted to travel North or South, you had to take the train to a city with a train station, like Cedar Rapids, where they had tracks running in all directions and you could transfer to a North-South track. You also had to be able to tell which direction the trains were traveling by reading the schedule board, posted above the ticket agent's window. You could find out what direction the train was traveling by looking at the Train Number column. Even Numbered trains traveled east and odd numbered trains traveled west. |