Company reports and surveys

About these books

The railway, as the directors reported it each year

Once a year the directors of a railway company had to tell the people who owned it how their money was being spent. The report was printed and sent to every stockholder, and it usually came in three parts: the directors’ own letter, the treasurer’s accounts, and the report of the engineer or superintendent on the road itself.

The Michigan Central’s report of June 1849 opens that way, in Boston, with the reports of Mr. Upton, the treasurer, and Mr. Brooks, superintendent and engineer, sent on to the stockholders. The directors admit to a hard year, with the business community embarrassed and all railroad securities discredited “by the errors of a few companies”, and say they would sooner sell more stock at par than issue more bonds. Mr. Brooks then reports a line from Detroit to New Buffalo about two hundred and eighteen and a half miles long, and a new company steamboat, the May Flower, 290 feet on deck with about 85 state rooms, put in service on the 28th of May. The year’s accounts show 96,070 passengers carried, and $115,015.61 taken for carrying wheat and flour alone.

The Baltimore and Ohio’s reports on the site begin in 1831. Alongside the annual reports are the surveys made before a line was built, the prospectuses that went out to raise the money, and the great government surveys of the 1850s for a railroad to the Pacific, which run to hundreds of pages a volume.