Bridges history column: Jay Gould laid foundation of Texas railroad, national network

The late 1800s was the age of the railroad.  Trains steamed across the hills, valleys, and plains of a growing United States, steadily bringing distant communities closer together.  Thousands of miles of track were laid down by thousands of men to build a rail network that brought people and goods from one end of the country to the other.  One of the most important figures in Texas railroad development was business titan Jay Gould.

Born Jason Gould in Roxbury, New York, into a farming family in 1836, he grew to hate farming.  As a result, his father, John Burr Gould, reportedly left him at a boarding school with 50 cents and a few changes of clothes.  Gould, however, was a quick study with an aptitude for math.  As a young man, he found work as an accountant and as a surveyor.

By 1859, he started investing heavily in railroads.  After the Civil War, he concentrated on New York-area railways, earning impressive profits and steadily gaining more influence in the railroad industry.  The Civil War had delayed railroad construction in the South, and Gould became determined to expand his holdings in the region, ultimately buildings lines from Missouri to Texas and west to Colorado.  He formed the Texas and Pacific Railroad by an agreement with the state legislature in 1871.  By 1873, he gained control of the powerful Erie Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad, taking advantage of financial crises and scandals surrounding both companies.  In 1879, he took control of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, giving him effective control of one-sixth of the nation’s rails.

As Gould looked west of the Mississippi River, he quickly moved to crush his rivals.  Gould merged his many company interests and built hundreds of miles completing tracks across the region.  The St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad, in which Gould had heavily invested, had completed a line from St. Louis to the Texas border by this time.  As the Texas and Pacific reached the Arkansas state line in 1873, he parceled out the land connected his railway with the Iron Mountain route and formed the city of Texarkana at the junction of the railroads and the state boundaries.

Gould would buy the St. Louis Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad in 1881 to more fully incorporate his Missouri Pacific network.  Fort Worth would become an important terminus for his railroad as he pushed his railroad empire steadily westward.  The Missouri Pacific would become a powerful force in locomotive passenger and freight traffic across the Southwest.  In fact, “MoPac,” an acronym for the railroad, is a heavily-traveled road in Austin and was named for the railway.  By the 1890s, Gould’s companies promised passengers train travel from Chicago, Illinois, to California, through Texas, in just three days.

He would be responsible for the names of several cities across the nation as his railroads rolled through. Gouldsboro, Pennsylvania, was renamed for him. Gould, Ohio, was named after one of his railroad depots in 1881.  Paragould, in the northeast corner of Arkansas, was named for Gould and Texas and St. Louis Railroad owner and rival J. W. Paramore when the town was founded at the intersections of their two routes in 1882.

Gould was both admired and hated in his day.  He had become incredibly successful in the railroad industry, but his labor policies sparked some of the largest labor strikes in Texas History.

For all of his accomplishments in building railroads, he did not live a long life to enjoy it.  Gould died of tuberculosis in New York City in 1892.  Though railroads have declined in relative importance since his day, the railroad magnate put Texas and America on the path to the twentieth century.

Ken Bridges is a writer, historian and native Texan. He holds a doctorate from the University of North Texas. Bridges can be reached by email at drkenbridges@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Bridges: Jay Gould laid foundation for Texas railroad, national lines