‘A Road to the Moon’: Sylvester Marsh’s Cog Railway to the Pinnacle of the Northeast

Modern Biodiesel Locomotive In the White Mountains of New Hampshire takes tourists to the top of Mount Washington. (Sergey and Marina Pyataev/Shutterstock)

On a day when the peak is shrouded by mist, passengers on the Mount Washington cog railway feel like they really could be on a railway to the heavens. Ascending to above the tree line and into the clouds, with each trip the railway invokes the imagination of its creator.

Sylvester Marsh, a 49-year-old entrepreneur, found himself and a friend temporarily lost on the tallest mountain in the Northeastern United States during a storm in 1852. At 6,288 feet, Mount Washington soars above New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Washington is just one of the “Northern Presidentials”—connected peaks bearing the names of early American presidents (the others: Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, plus Clay).

Forced to temporarily abandon their push for the summit, the pair quickly sought some natural shelter. Once the storm passed, they managed to arrive at the top after all. Wandering through the alpine meadows and glacial cirques, Sylvester Marsh came up with an outrageous idea.

Portrait of Sylvester Marsh in The Bay State Monthly (May 1885), as reproduced by The Project Gutenberg. (Public Domain)

A Founder of Chicago

Marsh had been born in Campton, less than 60 miles (as the crow flies) from Mount Washington, in the foothills of the White Mountains. The ninth of 11 children and the recipient of only the most rudimentary schooling, Marsh nevertheless advanced his lot through hard work and persistence. At age 19, and over the course of three grueling days, he walked to Boston in search of employment. He eventually established himself as a merchant plying the provision-and-meat trade routes—notably incorporating the recently completed Erie Canal—between the Ohio backcountry and the eastern cities. Americans had been bringing their hogs and cattle over the Appalachians and into the Ohio River valley since the late 18th century, and in much larger numbers since 1818 (the year the National Road facilitated easier east–west travel). But by the winter of 1833, purveyor of pork and beef Sylvester Marsh could be found even farther west, in Chicago. This was the same year, incidentally, that the still-diminutive settlement, having just achieved a population of two hundred, was first incorporated as a town, making Marsh one of Chicago’s founders. Marsh supplied fresh meat to the town and adjacent Fort Dearborn.

But the Panic of 1837 wiped out much (perhaps all) of Marsh’s accumulated fortune. The dogged New Hampshirite reacted by diversifying into the grain industry—and once again he managed to amass considerable wealth. Decades later, of course, Chicago would become by far the largest meatpacking center in the United States—and in this, too, Marsh had a hand. Indeed, according to one late-19th-century biography, Sylvester Marsh was the industry’s very architect: “The meatpacking industry was originated by him, and he made many appliances that were incidental to its success.” Marsh was especially adept at harnessing the power of steam for practical use—as, for example, in the production of “Marsh’s caloric dried meal,” a breakfast cereal that sold for decades, and, possibly, even the coffee percolator. His specially dried corn was shipped as far afield as Mexican California and Europe. “The effect of his discovery upon the demand for our great staple [corn] in Europe,” trumpeted the Chicago Press and Tribune, “can scarcely be over-estimated. We regard this as one of the most important discoveries of the age, and its enterprising, ingenious inventor will live in history as one of the benefactors of his species.” Meanwhile, Marsh continued shipping large quantities of pork and beef to Boston.

An Outrageous Idea

It was during this period when, during a trip back home to New Hampshire, he attempted his fateful ascent of Mount Washington. Three years later, in 1855, having helped lay the foundations of Chicago—and the industry that would come to define it, to boot—Sylvester Marsh moved back to New England.

And thus we return to his outrageous idea: He would build a railway to the summit of Mount Washington.

Train car and tracks on the Cog Railway on Mount Washington, NH. (Joe Klementovich/Getty Images)

This was a particularly challenging prospect since, generally speaking, railroads were built on gradients of less than 10 percent; a Mount Washington locomotive, along the most favorable 3-mile route, would still need to contend with steepness grades of up to 37 percent as it chugged its way up more than 3,500 feet in elevation. How was his train to gain the necessary traction in such conditions? And what about the rugged terrain—or the fact that Marsh’s base (eventually Littleton, New Hampshire) was 25 miles away? On the other hand, should Sylvester Marsh succeed in his audacious plan, his would be the first mountain-climbing railway of its kind—and the steepest railway—in the world.

Marsh surveyed the proposed route himself, then applied to the New Hampshire legislature for a charter for the road, promptly earning himself the nickname “Crazy Marsh.” Perhaps out of sheer curiosity (yet certainly also in consideration of his undeniably impressive record as an inventor), the legislature awarded him the charter in June 1858, though not without sarcastically offering him “the right to build a road to the moon,” too. “Some of the members called it madness,” a 19th-century newspaper informed readers, “others ridiculed and none believed that there was anything in it.”

Marsh found few investors willing to bank on such an “impossible” enterprise, and so he initially funded the project virtually on his own. As for the technical challenges of the venture, Marsh developed a unique friction braking system and, most importantly, his own version of the “cog-rail.” The cog (or rack) railway, first invented in 1812 in the English city of Leeds at a time when some doubted friction alone could adequately secure a steam locomotive, fit wheels with teeth into track with teeth. (The English version proved unnecessary and was now long out of use; it was never used for mountain-climbing in any case.) Marsh’s driving wheel was similarly bristling with teeth, but his wrought-iron, L-shaped rails secured ladder-rung-like rollers or pins between them, each roller spaced so that the wheel’s teeth fit snugly between them. His cog-rail was also positioned in the center (the English version had been on one side only). All of this, of course, was designed not only to provide the traction necessary to move up a slope, but also to prevent the locomotive from sliding backwards!

Marsh acquired a patent for his rack railway concept in September 1861—five months after Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to combat the Southern “combinations,” and two months after the First Battle of Bull Run.

A Wonder of the World

The war delayed construction, but by 1866, Marsh had completed a quarter-mile of track. To transport materials—including his steam locomotive, disassembled—to the base of the mountain required teams of oxen, which Marsh at first drove himself. His camp he built mostly from the trees at the foot of the mountain, where he erected a water-powered sawmill to cut timber for miles of wooden framework. This was his solution to the problem of rugged terrain, and in the end, almost all of the railway’s track would be built high in the air on these trestles. He built a forge, too, in part for reassembling the locomotive—nicknamed “Hero”—he’d hauled in pieces from Littleton. Though the track remained mostly unfinished, Marsh felt ready to hold a public demonstration of his mountain-climbing cog railway.

Mount Washington Cog Railroad at the top of Mount Washington in White Mountain in fall, New Hampshire, USA. (travelview/Shutterstock)

The crowd that gathered that August watched as Marsh’s locomotive, with its six-and-a-half-ton, 50-horse-power engine, pushed the train’s single car up a western spur of Mount Washington at 2 miles an hour. The train then returned, the locomotive remaining on the downhill end. This was repeated several times, with guests on board—and all, it seems, were impressed. “Crazy Marsh” had done it! Much-needed investment now poured in. By 1868, the railway was open for business, running all the way to the steepest portion of the route (called “Jacob’s Ladder,” where the grade rose to almost 2,000 feet per mile). By mid-1869, the track extended to the very top of Mount Washington. Seventeen years after that stormy climb, Sylvester Marsh could ride a train to the summit—his own train. Contemporaries considered it “the greatest engineering feat of the century” and “one of the wonders of the world.”

Marsh never made much money from his Mount Washington enterprise—indeed, all told, the project may have been a loss. Then again, an 1885 biographer insists, “immense wealth was never his aim.” Rather, he was “large in his ideas.” And by the time he passed away in 1884, his cog railway had gained national and international fame; engineers from the Swiss Alps traveled to New Hampshire to study his design so that they could imitate it at home. Almost 100 years after Marsh’s death, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers found Marsh’s cog railway “so impressive that, for the first time, two national engineering societies have combined their conclusions in order to designate the train system as a National Historical Mechanical and Civil Engineering Landmark.”

In continuous operation since 1869 (except for brief stints during the two world wars), Sylvester Marsh’s mountain-climbing cog railway still runs to this day.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.