Urban Capital and the Superiority of Pennsylvania's Transportation Network

TL;DRAbstract

Some time in the 1850s John Hartwell Cocke, the James River planter who had worked so hard to improve Virginia's transportation network, sat down to scribble a few “Notes on Starting a Great Commercial City.” Cocke sought to demonstrate that a “point of land forming the northern bank of [the] James River at its entrance into Hampton Roads” could become the site of a grand metropolis that would dominate the trade of America's Atlantic coast. He predicted that with a little courage and enterprise “[a] city will spring up at the mouth of [the] James River – which for rapidity of growth 8c accumulation of wealth will ecliyspe [sic] the famed History of St. Louis and Chicago.” Even by the rather generous standards of nineteenth-century American boosterism, Cocke's effort to show how Virginians could build a port that would quickly surpass New York and Philadelphia bordered on the ridiculous. The location for his great commercial city, he freely admitted, was nothing more than “a barren prom

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