The Railroads: Moving Agricultural Products to Eastern Markets, 1890

The railroad web linked the grain-producing regions of the Midwest with the population centers of the Northeast. the urban areas of the nation, with a population density of over ninety people per square mile (shaded in blue), were chiefly located in New England, the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and the industrial regions surrounding Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Chicago. This area needed to import massive amounts of grain—milled wheat and corn—to feed its people. The map also indicates that the main grain-growing regions were in the Midwest, the northern Great Plains, and the South. The nation’s basic economic geography presumed a transportation system to ship grain from the Midwest and South to the cities of the industrial Northeast.