Data developed and created by Killeen Hanson and Emily Brodman in conjunction with the Spatial History Lab at Stanford University. Data collected June-July 2009, and eventually used in the publication of Tracing Railroad Directors, 1872-1894 and Western Railroads and Eastern Capital: Regional Networks on Railroad Boards of Directors, 1872-1894, both published Summer 2009 at the Spatial History Project website.

For the stockholder and railroad directors visualizations, members of our team collected annual records from Union Pacific, annual Poors Manual of Railroads which listed the board of directors, and finance records from trust companies.

To find the annual finance records for trust companies, we first looked at the Poors Manual of Railroads to determine which trust company was the trustee for our railroad companies of interest. We then looked at public documents from New York and Massachusetts, particularly the Annual Reports of the Board of Commissioners of Savings Banks of Massachusetts, which would list the members of the board of directors for trust companies for individual years. We then cross-checked the names and years of trust directors with the names and years of the railroad directors to find potential matches. Many of the matches were obvious  the same person might sit on both boards at once, or move between a trustees board and the railroads board, or members of the board would share the same last name. Other connections were less obvious. We looked into obituaries for the trust and railroad directors to identify other family members that didnt share the same last name, or to identify other shared companies. The records were spotty for many companies, but we were confident enough in the records for some companies during some years to make solid assumptions about how wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers moved around directorships to ensure the financial success of railroads.  

The different sheets are various trust companies and banks that insured the railroads or served as trustees for railroad companies. Bolded names were the president of the board of directors during that particular year, while italicized names served as officers of the board.

The reuse and adaptation of this data is encouraged for scholarly work. Commercial use is strictly prohibited.

Visualization Links:
Tracing Railroad Directors, 1872-1894
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=115&project_id=0

Western Railroads and Eastern Capital: Regional Networks on Railroad Boards of Directors, 1872-1894,

About Our Process: Richard dropped off a list of stockholders of the Union Pacific.  While Evgenia Shnayder and Samantha Azure were tinkering with the stockholder data, I (Killeen) looked up a few of the names to see what further connection to the railroad they might have.  My original thought was to verify who might have been involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal.  What I discovered (besides information on the scandal - most everyone was involved) was that a large percentage of the stockholders were also on the boards of directors of the Union Pacific and had official connections to other boards on other railroads as well.  Stephanie Chan took the lead on digitizing (typing up) the changing boards of a few major railroad companies (as designated by Richard) over time.  We used Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States as our primary sources.  The Poor's books list the composition of railroad boards for every railroad for every year.  We have Poor's books from 1872 to 1894.  After digitizing the lists of board members, Stephanie, Emily Brodman and I started drawing connections between people who served on more than one board at the same time, served on several boards over several years, when big shifts in board members (large exoduses and introductions) might signal a change in leadership in the railroad. Our assumption, in noting these connections between railroads was to see which railroads might have an intimate knowledge of the particular workings and financials of another railroad.  Most of the connections were logical: many of the same men served on several boards within the Burlington system, for example.  Emily Brodman looked into the data more closely, researching how the railroads financed some of their construction and what banks and trusts were behind the scenes.  This visualization looks at the geographical connections between the members of the different boards of directors.  In some ways, we were looking for the geographical center of power in the world of nineteenth century railroad companies.  This visualization also looks at the tenure of members of the board: Who sat of boards longest?  Which boards had the highest turnover rate?  I constructed the animation in Flash using the regions of the country as buttons to move to different movie clips that revealed the network associated with that geographic region.  We also included a little extra information about some of the more important personalities or groups of people that were at the center of these networks.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=113&project_id=0

