Foreword: This book marks an important anniversary in the history of our development as a nation. In 1838 Congress established the Corps of Topographical Engineers, an organization whose main purpose was the peacetime fostering of economic growth and national cohesion. This small dedicated group of officers contributed to the development of many aspects of the national transportation network-railroads, highways, and inland waterways. They provided maps for overland travelers and charts for navigators on our Great Lakes. By the time that the organization was abolished during the Civil War, it had played a major part in a period of dramatic development aptly characterized by one historian as a “transportation revolution.”
