Thumbscrew Torture Device

Thumbscrew

Now, people know what this contraption is? These are thumb screws. Thumbscrews are basically an instrument of torture.

They would be used on a slave ship in the aftermath, especially of an uprising, and insurrection in which the ring leaders would have their thumbs placed under the metal loops, the key turned producing a kind of pain that is almost indescribable from what I can learn of it.

Leaving a man in that condition for hours if not days and after which the thumb might have to be amputated. In his parliamentary testimony, John Newton said, “I have known slave ship captains to use thumbscrews that produce the most excruciating pain among the enslaved”.

I dare say he did know it because he himself had used them as he describes in his journal, and moreover folks, he used them on children on one occasion because he thought they had passed tools to the men through the gratings which they then used to get out of their irons and to try to rise up and capture the ship. (Talk given by Marcus Rediker in November 2007 at Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool Museum)

The thumbscrews or pilliwinks is a torture instrument which was first used in medieval Europe. It is a simple vice, sometimes with protruding studs on the interior surfaces. The victim's thumbs or fingers were placed in the vice and slowly crushed. The thumbscrew was also applied to crush prisoners' big toes. The crushing bars were sometimes lined with sharp metal points to puncture the nails and inflict greater pain in the nail beds. Larger, heavier devices based on the same design principle were applied to crush knees and elbows.

Richard Oswald: Slave trader, merchant

Richard Oswald: Slave trader, merchant and diplomat

Richard Oswald was the son of a Presbyterian minister. He was apprenticed to his cousins in Glasgow who had a successful trade in tobacco and he traveled to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of British North America on their behalf. In 1746 he moved to London and began his own business, initially supplying the army and Royal Navy as well as trading tobacco, but moving quickly into slaves and sugar. He augmented his business interests by marrying Mary Ramsay, the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican merchant. In 1747, he and several associates bought Bance (also Bunce or Bence) Island in the Sierra Leone river, one of the most active slave trading posts on the West African coast. Oswald built a golf course there for the benefit of white slave traders.

Bance (also Bunce or Bence) Island in the Sierra Leone river, one of the most active slave trading posts on the West African coast.

Oswald also acquired shares in slave ships, and plantations in the Caribbean, Florida and South Carolina. His ships could then carry slaves from Bance Island to plantations in the Americas and return to England with cargoes of sugar and tobacco. He was part of a group of Scottish merchants based in London who assisted each other financially, sharing their investments to spread the risk and ensure more reliable and consistent profits. Capital gained from investments in slavery financed investments in related products, such as tobacco and sugar production.

On July 25, 1782, official negotiations began. The preliminary articles were signed by Oswald for Great Britain, and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens for the United States on November 30, 1782. With almost no alterations, these articles were made into a treaty on September 3, 1783.

Most of the slaves Oswald traded were shipped to the southern colonies of British North America. One of his most important business associates there was the South Carolina planter and slave owner Henry Laurens. In 1781, Oswald lobbied successfully for Laurens' release after he was captured by the Royal Navy when he was returning from negotiating Dutch support for the American War of Independence. The following year, Oswald became an adviser to the British prime minister, Lord Shelburne. His knowledge of North America resulted in his appointment as one of the British negotiators at the 1783 Paris peace conference with the American colonies. Laurens was on the American team. The two sides agreed that the British should not take 'Negroes or other Property' from Americans when they withdrew from the American colonies.

Auchincruive House. Richard Oswald (a merchant from London, and a commissioner in Paris for peace negotiations with the Americans) bought the estate in 1764.

Oswald's London base was at Philpot Lane in the City of London, but his vast fortune enabled him to buy Auchincruive - an estate in Scotland where the Adam brothers built him a large house - as well as an extensive library and art collection. (BBC Business of Enslavement)

Paul Jennings was President James Madison's enslaved manservant

Paul Jennings, who was born a slave on President James Madison’s estate at Montpelier in 1799, was a "body servant" who attended the president until his death in 1836. Jennings later purchased his freedom from Daniel Webster. Webster acquired Jennings from Pollard Webb who in turn bought the manservant from Dolley Madison in 1846. After meeting the terms of his agreement with Webster, Jennings became a free man and found work at the Department of the Interior. In 1865, Jennings published, Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, the first memoir about the White House by one who had lived there. The publication remained obscure for many years because it was printed in a limited edition, but today it is acknowledged by scholars as a classic. It provided details about one of the most critical periods in the history of the city of Washington–the War of 1812–and the formation of the city’s enterprising free Negro community in the antebellum period. It also recounted Jennings’s involvement in a plan in 1848 to undertake a large-scale escape of slaves from the capital aboard the schooner Pearl.

Americans follow African slave trail

Donkor Nsuo "Slave River" at Assin Manso, Ghana

Photographer George Marfo, 2006

The BBC's Orla Guerin meets African Americans coming to Ghana in the hope of connecting spiritually with West African ancestors sold into slavery.

Tina Bailey feels the pull of Africa - so strongly that she has just traveled to Ghana from her home in Tennessee for the third time.

She is one of many African Americans coming to follow in the footsteps of ancestors they cannot name who were enslaved and sent to the New World.

The first stop for Tina's tour group is by the "slave river" at Assin Manso - where captives had their last bathe on African soil. Tina slips away from the group to spend a moment alone by the water's edge. She says it is hard to see all this again, but she feels compelled to.

"It's very hard, it's very hurtful," she says, speaking through her tears.

"But if this happened to my people, I can at least walk their path several times. It's my connection to home. It's probably the only way I'll know where home is."

Tina can't be sure her ancestors were Ghanaian. She knows they came from West Africa and is considering DNA testing to try to find out more. But for her this is a homecoming, and the history here is deeply personal.

"This is my pain," she says, "and my mother's pain, my family's pain, and it hurts a lot," she says.

Ghanaian welcome

Further down the coast, the slave castles built by the European powers still stand - brutal reminders of a time West Africa was robbed of the young and the strong, and the future was taken away in chains.

The first stop is at Cape Coast Castle - forbidding and fortified - which was at the centre of the slave trade.

Tina and her fellow tourists, who come from across the USA, descend to the dungeons. They are airless, dark, desperate places. Each one held up to 200 men, crammed in, struggling for breath. They waited a month for the slave ships to arrive. Local experts say more than half of them died.

The tourists form a circle, joining their hands and bowing their heads in honour of their dead ancestors.

Outside in the courtyard, Obasi Kitambi, a doctoral student from Chicago, says it was painful that his people "endured so much treachery and torture and pain, and even today people are not really acknowledging that".

But he says it is "critical" that African Americans make this journey.

Ghana is keen to bring back the descendants of the slaves, to visit, invest or take up residence.

It is urging every African in the diaspora to make a pilgrimage here at least once in their lifetimes, and bear witness to history. Some are doing more than that.

Rosa Kincaid, a doctor based in St Louis, has made a lasting connection to the Ghanaian village of Kanka.

Wearing traditional robes and draped in glittering jewellery, including an ornate crown, she was made an honorary chief of the village, where she hopes to build a clinic.

"I am the sister who has returned, the daughter who has returned," she told villagers at the ceremony "and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you all."

She says it will not be easy to deliver a clinic for the villagers but she hopes to be "empowered by the ancestors".

Sensing the horror

Two hundred years after Britain abolished the slave trade, there is talk in Ghana of the need for the West to address the debts of history - to begin a debate on the issue of reparations and what form they might take.

Many African Americans are haunted by slavery and its legacy, and feel they have not received an adequate apology.

According to the American civil rights activist, the Rev Jesse Jackson, "there must be some sense of remorse, and some commitment to attempt to repay the damage done".

On a visit to Ghana, he told BBC News that the beneficiaries of the slave trade, including Britain and America, should face the truth of the past.

"It's time for truth and reconciliation," he said.

"But those who want reconciliation want to avoid the truth of the exploitation. Africa is the foundation of Europe and America's wealth. Africa is the creditor. Europe and America are the debtors."

Back at the coast, the last stop for the tourists is Elmina Castle, which was built by the Portuguese in 1482 - before Columbus discovered America.

They squeeze through the narrow arch that leads to the "room of no return". It's grimy and claustrophobic, empty of everything but the sins of the past.

From here the slaves were forced on to ships that would take them across the Atlantic to toil and die.

"You can feel the spirits here," Tina Bailey says.

"You can smell what happened here. You can almost taste it. It was quite a holocaust, very inhumane, and I'd like to say never again - never, ever again."

For Tina, Ghana is journey's end. After her death she wants her ashes brought here from America and scattered at a beach along the coast. (source: BBC)

Liverpool Slave Connection

By Robert Barr, Associated Press

LIVERPOOL, England — Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place "in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies." But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.

The street in Liverpool, home town of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages which took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.

Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking until the slave trade was abolished 200 years ago. Their ships carried millions of human beings from West Africa to the plantations of the Americas in a triangular trade which also brought profitable cargoes of sugar, tobacco and rum to England.

Martins Bank - Liverpool

One of two panels at the public entrance to the Barclays (originally Martins) Bank building in Liverpool. It is a reminder of how Liverpool became a wealthy city, although the building itself is less than a century old, showing Neptune with his hands over two African slave children holding bags of money. If you download and zoom in you can make out the manacles on the wrists and ankles of the children (image and text from Flicker)

Liverpool's rise, says local historian Ray Costello, is summed up in the carving on a bank facade: two black children supporting Liverpool as Neptune.

"What it really means is that this bank was founded on the slave trade," Costello said.

It resonates all the more with the approach of the March 25 anniversary of the British parliamentary act that abolished the slave trade in Britain's colonies 200 years ago — though not slavery itself.

Liverpool's problem is its "hidden history — nobody wants to talk about it," said Eric Lynch, a black Liverpudlian who leads walking tours in the west coast city.

However, the past has not gone unacknowledged.

The city council formally apologized in 1999, expressing "shame and remorse for the city's role in this trade in human misery."

It has commissioned statues titled "Reconciliation," two abstract bronze figures embracing, which will be dedicated this year in Richmond, Va., and Benin, a West African port of call for Liverpool's slave ships.

Reconciliation statue

On Aug. 23, the anniversary of the slave uprising in French-ruled Haiti in 1791, Liverpool will open the International Slavery Museum. Part of its mission is recovering Liverpool's history, which remains a fraught issue.

Lynch, the tour guide, finds the echoes in the streets named for slave traders — Bamber, Banastre, Cunliffe, Gascoyne, Oldham, Seel, Tarleton; in a balcony railing made of chains by one of the businesses which depended on the trade; in the face of an African woman in the frieze around the ornate Town Hall.

Liverpool council member Barbara Mace last year proposed renaming streets associated with slavery, and was surprised to learn that Penny Lane was among them. After a lively controversy the proposal was withdrawn.

Liverpool was once the home of John Newton, the slave ship captain who became an ardent abolitionist and wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace."

The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson visited Liverpool in 1787, collecting horrifying stories from sailors and buying tools of the trade: chains, manacles, iron collars and branding irons which made effective publicity for William Wilberforce's 20-year campaign in Parliament to abolish the trade.

"By the end of the 19th century, a lot of rich families were trying to sanitize their wealth, and every trace of slavery they got rid of," said Costello, who has been researching the history of fellow blacks in his city for nearly half a century.

Liverpool: The new International Slavery Museum will include a state of the art education facility named after Anthony Walker. © Redman Design

What Liverpool needs to do, Costello says, is "take off its shades and see the blacks," who have been in the city since the 18th century but still find themselves mistaken for recent immigrants.

Blacks now represent 7% of the workforce in the city of 450,000.

Because the slaves sailed direct from Africa to the New World, Liverpool saw little of the trade at close quarters.

Richard Benjamin, director of the new museum, said that only 11 slaves are known to have been sold in the city. Some slaves who were given their freedom for fighting against the American Revolution made their way to Liverpool, while others came as crewmen on ships, Costello said.

The abolition act in 1807 was a milestone, but Britain waited another 26 years to outlaw slavery in the colonies; the United States followed in 1865 and Brazil in 1888.

Anti-Slavery International, founded by the leaders of Britain's abolition movement, estimates that 12 million people are in some form of slavery today, as bonded laborers or in the sex trade.

Slavery is now illegal everywhere, said Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International, but "laws today are not being implemented."

"We have to not just reflect on the reality and horrors of the slave trade but to see that people power had a very important role in overthrowing the trade, and that people today still have a role to play," she said.

Liverpool joined the slave trade in 1699 when a ship named Liverpool Merchant put to sea, carrying 220 slaves from West Africa to Barbados. Sir Thomas Johnson, a part-owner of the ship, is known as the founder of modern Liverpool; Sir Thomas Street is named for him.

By 1750, Liverpool had surpassed London and Bristol as a slave-trading port; 45 years later it controlled 80% of the British slave trade, representing two-fifths of the European total. In the peak year of 1798, 149 ships set off from Liverpool for Africa, officially with the capacity to carry 53,000 slaves.

By one accounting, Liverpool's traders transported 1,364,930 Africans in 5,249 voyages between 1699 and 1807.

Africans, often the captives of local chiefs, were paid for with cloth, kitchen pots and pans, muskets, gunpowder, flints, hats, mirrors, candles, beads and brandy.

A page displayed at the trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool details the profits of the voyage of the Enterprize in 1794. The ship sold 356 slaves and cleared a profit of 10,000 pounds — equivalent to about $2 million today.

Cutaway model of Slave ship. Liverpool Slavery Museum

It was a brutal trade, killing untold numbers of Africans in slave raids, by disease, shipwreck and mistreatment. Women captives were raped. Ship crews suffered heavy death rates from disease.

Alexander Falconbridge, a Bristol ship captain who became an abolitionist, said slaves on some ships were forced to lie on each other in crowded holds during a voyage of at least six weeks. Writing in 1788, he said, "the floor of their rooms was so covered with blood and mucus ... that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of the human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful and disgusting."

Some denied it. Robert Norris, a former slave ship captain who was one of Liverpool's lobbyists in Parliament, claimed that after dinner the slaves aboard ship were given pipes, tobacco and musical instruments, "and when tired of music and dancing, they then go to games of chance."

Penny, another Liverpool lobbyist, told legislators that slaves slept aboard their ships "better than the gentlemen do on shore."

One of the worst atrocities was aboard the Liverpool slave ship Zong, which was wracked with disease; Capt. Luke Collingwood ordered the crew to throw 133 sick slaves overboard, then tried to claim against insurance for "loss of merchandise."

The abolitionist Granville Sharp demanded a murder prosecution, but the government's attorney responded: "It is madness; the blacks were property."

The Zong incident was one among many that fired the zeal of abolitionists — a mass movement built on networks of Quakers, with Sharp, Wilberforce and Clarkson in prominent leadership roles.

Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery pioneer, made an engraving of a kneeling slave in chains with the words "am I not a man and a brother?" Reproduced in the thousands on medallions, hat pins and brooches, it was worn by fashionable supporters of the cause.

In retrospect, the attitudes of some abolitionists now appear puzzling. Newton made two slave voyages even after being converted by the "amazing grace ... that saved a wretch like me."

"During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness. I was, upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me," Newton wrote.

However, he added, "I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles."

PBS Secrets Of The Dead: Slave Ship Mutiny

PBS Program: Secrets of the Dead "Slave Ship Mutiny"

When the Meermin set sail from Madagascar for South Africa on a hot summer’s day in 1766, the Dutch crew had no idea they were about to make history. The ship was filled to capacity with human cargo, slaves bound for hard labor building the Dutch West India Company’s colony at Cape Town.

But the Meermin with its crew and cargo would never make it to Cape Town. Instead, in a dramatic altercation, the slaves mutinied and managed to overpower the Dutch crew, ordering the ship be sailed back to Madagascar and freedom. But the crew of experience sailors deceived the slaves and turned the boat around each evening to make for Cape Town. And so the circumstances for a dramatic climax – and shipwreck – were laid when the ship and its desperate passengers finally spied land.

Watch the "Slave Ship Mutiny" as it tracks the efforts of archaeologists, historians and slave descendants to discover the full story of this dramatic historical event. They want to learn what happened on the Meermin, how the slaves were able to overpower their captors, and why the ship ended up wrecked on a wild, windswept beach 200 miles east of Cape Town.

The slave ship Meermin set sail from Madagascar for South Africa in 1766, but the ship would never make it to Cape Town, the slaves mutinied and managed to overpower the Dutch crew, ordering the ship be sailed back to Madagascar and freedom.Watch the full episode. See more Secrets of the Dead.

The Slave Ship Zong Case

William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840

The Zong Massacre was an infamous mass-killing of African slaves that took place on the Zong, a British ship owned by James Gregson and colleagues in a Liverpool slave-ship firm. The resulting court case was a landmark in the battle against the African Slave Trade of the eighteenth century.(source Nation Master)

The Zong was a Dutch ship which had been captured by the British. Its original name, Zorg (Dutch for 'care') was misread as Zong.(source Nation Master)

The Zong left Sao Tomé, an island off the west coast of Africa, on September 6, 1781 carrying some 170 slaves and a crew of 17 en route to England on the Middle Passage captained by Sir Luke Collingwood. Its first destination was to be Jamaica. On November 27, 1781 it arrived at an island which the crew believed to be Jamaica.(source Nation Master)

The ship had taken on more slaves than it could safely transport. By November 29, 1781, this overcrowding, together with malnutrition and disease, had killed seven of the crew and approximately sixty African slaves - Captain Collingwood decided to throw the remaining sick slaves overboard.

Captain Collingwood

He assumed that as the slaves were considered in law to be cargo he could claim the loss against the insurance policy so, as the ship's insurance would not pay for sick slaves or slaves that died of illness, gave orders for the 133 slaves to be drowned. The policy allowed that if a slave went over the side alive, then the Liverpool ship-owners could claim but that if a slave died on board, then the insurers would not pay because that would be deemed to be bad cargo management and therefore not covered by the policy. Later, it was claimed that the slaves had been jettisoned because it was required "for the safety of the ship" as the ship did not have enough water to keep them alive for the rest of the voyage. This claim was later disproved; the ship had 420 gallons of water left on arrival on December 22 in Jamaica.(source Nation Master)

The ship´s owners brought a suit against the insurers,which came to court, twice, in March 1783, demanding to be paid £30 for each slave. The British court stated that there was ”no doubt that (though it shocks one very much) the case was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard” and ruled that the ship-owners could not claim insurance on the slaves because the lack of sufficient water demonstrated that the cargo had been badly managed. No officers or crew, however, were charged or prosecuted for the calculated killing of 133 people.

Indeed, the Solicitor-General, John Lee, declared that a master could drown slaves without “a surmise of impropriety”. He stated: "What is this claim that human people have been thrown overboard? This is a case of chattels or goods.Blacks are goods and property;it is madness to accuse these well-serving honourable men of murder. They acted out of necessity and in the most appropriate manner for the cause. The late Captain Collingwood acted in the interest of his ship to protect the safety of his crew.To question the judgement of an experienced well-travelled captain held in the highest regard is one of folly, especially when talking of slaves.The case is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard." (source Nation Master)

Medical log of a slave ship, 1792

Medical or scientific theories about the physical differences between African and European races were used to justify the brutal treatment of slaves. Christopher Bowes was a surgeon on the slave ship Lord Stanley. He kept a daily log of the sickness rates and treatments for the 389 Africans chained on board. Sixteen died during the ship's journey from Africa to Grenada.

From the collections of the Library at The Royal College of Surgeons of England

The PETITION of the SHARKS of AFRICA

To the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled.

The PETITION of the SHARKS of AFRICA

Sheweth,

THAT your petitioners are a numerous body, and at present in a very flourishing situation, owing chiefly to the constant visitation of the shipping of your island.

That by hovering round these floating dungeons, your petitioners are supplied with large quantities of their most favourite food - human flesh.

That your petitioners are sustained, not only by the carcases of those who have fallen by distempers, but are frequently gratified with rich repasts from the bodies of living negroes who voluntarily plunge into the abodes of your petitioners, preferring instant destruction by their jaws, to the imaginary horrors of a lingering slavery.

That among the enormous breakers and surfs which roll on the shores of your petitioners, numbers of English boats are destroyed, the crews of which usually fall to their lot, and afford them many a delicious meal, but, above all, that large vessels crowded with negroes, are sometimes dashed on the rocks and shoals which abound in the regions of your petitioners, whereby hundreds of human beings, both black and white, are at once precipitated into their element, where the gnawing human flesh, and the crashing of bones, afford to your petitioners the highest gratification which their natures are capable of enjoying.

Thus benefited, as your petitioners are, by this widely extended traffic, a traffic which has never before been molested, it is with the utmost indignation they hear that there are in Britain men, who under the specious plea of humanity, are endeavouring to accomplish its abolition.- But your petitioners trust that this attempt at innovation, this flourishing of the trumpet of liberty, by which "more is meant than meets the ear", will be effectually frustrated.

Should the lower branch of the legislature be so far infatuated by this new-fangled humanity as seriously to meditate the destruction of this highly beneficial commerce, your petitioners have the firmest reliance on the wisdom and fellow-feeling of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of Great Britain.

Your petitioners know, that the truly benevolent will ever be consistent - that they will not sacrifice one part of animated nature to the preservation of another, that they will not suffer sharks to starve in order that negroes may be happy;- yet your petitioners are apprehensive, that the baleful influence of this philanthropic mania is already felt even within the walls of your Lordships, wherefore they crave to be HEARD BY COUNSEL at the bar of your august assembly, when, notwithstanding the wild ravings of fanaticism, they hope to evince, that the sustenance of sharks, and the best interests of your Lordships, are intimately connected with the traffic in human flesh.

Fearful of becoming tedious, your petitioners have only to add, that should the abolition take place, which the god of sharks avert, the prosperity of your petitioners will inevitably be destroyed, and their numbers, by being deprived of their accustomed food, rapidly diminished.- But, on the other hand, should your Lordships in your legislative capacity, scorn the feelings of the vulgar, and nobly interfere, either openly, or by procrastination, to preserve this invigorating trade from the ruin that now seems to await it, your petitioners, and their wide-mouthed posterity, as by nature urged, will ever, ever T.R.F.Y., &c.

click here to see full-size image

Historical Register or Edinburgh Monthly Intelligencer, May 1792

New York Slave Market

New York Slave-Market—About 1730

Slaves were introduced into N.Y. as early as 1626 when the West India Co. (a Dutch company), which had large establishments on the coast of Guinea, brought negroes to Manhattan, and practiced the slave trade here "without remorse."

It is said that in proportion to population N.Y. imported as many Africans as Virginia. That New York did not become a slave-state like Carolina was, according to Bancroft, "due to climate and not to the superior humanity of its founders. [Gov.] Stuyvesant was instructed to use every exertion to promote the sale of negroes.

They were imported sometimes by way of the West Indies, often directly from Guinea, and were sold at auction to the highest bidder. The average price was less than $140." With the extension of English rule to N.Y. in 1664 the slave trade in this colony passed into the hands of the British. It is estimated that the total import of slaves into all the British colonies of America and the West Indies from 1680 to 1786 was 2,130,000.

The traffic was then carried on principally from Liverpool, London and other English ports; the entire number of ships sailing from these ports then engaged in the slave traffic was 192, and in them space was provided for the transport of 47,146 negroes.

The native chiefs on the African coasts took up the hunt for human beings and engaged in forays, sometimes even on their own subjects, for the purpose of procuring slaves to be exchanged for western commodities. They often set fire to a village by night and captured the inhabitants when trying to escape. Out of every lot of 100 shipped from Africa, about 17 died either during the passage or before the sale at Jamaica, while not more than 50 lived through the "seasoning" process and became effective plantation laborers.

Slavery in N.Y. was continued till 1827. It was then abolished by terms of an act passed by the N.Y. Assembly ten years earlier.

source: THE GREATEST HIGHWAY IN THE WORLD Historical, Industrial and Descriptive Information of the Towns, Cities and Country passed through between New York and Chicago via The New York Central Lines