The Midwest

The Midwest was where much of 19th-century America went to work. It grew the wheat and corn, packed the meat, cut the timber and later built the cars. This board stretches the word a little past its usual borders, taking in Idaho and Montana along with the states around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

Chicago is at the center of the story. It grew from a small town in the 1830s to one of the largest cities in the world by 1900, mostly because the railroads met there. The Great Fire of 1871 burned much of it down. It rebuilt in time to invent the skyscraper and host the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Illinois beyond the city was farm country, and Lincoln's Springfield.

Michigan brings lumber, the Great Lakes and Detroit. In 1913 Henry Ford's Highland Park plant began using a moving assembly line, and within a few years Detroit was the automobile capital of the world. Mackinac Island, with no cars allowed and its Grand Hotel opened in 1887, was the summer escape. Wisconsin had dairy farms, breweries and lumber camps. Indiana had small towns, steel at Gary, and the Indianapolis 500, first run in 1911.

Missouri was the gateway. St. Louis sat near where the Missouri River joins the Mississippi, and wagons and steamboats headed west from there for decades. In 1904 the city hosted a world's fair to mark the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Further west, Montana grew on cattle, gold and the copper mines of Butte, which for a time were among the most productive in the world. Idaho, with its mountains, mines and the Snake River, is the least photographed of the group.

A good thing to look for in Midwestern town pictures is the grain elevator or the water tower. On flat land, they were the tallest thing for miles, and photographers often used them to frame a town. The railroad tracks are almost always somewhere in the picture, because without the railroad most of these towns would not have existed.