Tom Thumb and the Road to Ellicott’s Mills - Part 4
PART 4 OF 4 · HISTORY AT ELLICOTT CITY STATION
The Race, the Next Challenge, and the Making of a Legend
The Tom Thumb proved that steam could work on the B&O, but that was only the beginning. The famous horse race, the search for better locomotives, the challenge of Parr’s Ridge, and a growing focus on speed, capacity and efficiency helped turn an experiment into a new way of running a railroad, and eventually, a legend.
The Start of Something Big
In the first three parts of this series, we followed Peter Cooper’s small experimental locomotive from an unusual business problem in Baltimore to a remarkable series of tests on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
By late summer 1830, Cooper had already accomplished what he originally set out to do.
He had demonstrated that a steam locomotive could operate on the B&O’s actual railroad, not on a test track, not on a drawing board, and not under ideal English conditions. It could negotiate the sharp curves and modest grades between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, carry passengers, and return under its own power.
The B&O’s own 1830 report considered the experiment important because it answered one of the company’s most immediate technical doubts, that its curves would not prevent the successful use of locomotive power. The little engine itself was too small for practical service, but the report concluded that greater size and power could produce the desired result.
Peter Cooper had proved something important, but he had not proved everything.
And before the little locomotive disappeared from the B&O story, there was one more test. A test that ultimately became more famous than all the others.
The Famous Race Really Happened
The story has been told so many times that it has acquired the polished simplicity of folklore.
Peter Cooper’s locomotive and a horse-drawn railroad car lined up on parallel tracks. The race began. The locomotive pulled ahead. Then the belt operating its blower slipped from its pulley. Steam pressure dropped. Cooper desperately tried to replace the belt, injuring his hands in the process, while the horse passed the disabled machine and won.
For generations, that story has been repeated as the moment when the old world of horsepower challenged the coming age of steam.
There is a problem, however.
No contemporary newspaper account of a great public “horse versus locomotive” spectacle has yet been identified. That absence has led some modern interpretations to question whether the race occurred at all.
We think the evidence points in a different direction.
The race happened. What probably did not happen was the publicity event later generations imagined.
John H. B. Latrobe, who said he participated in Cooper’s early locomotive demonstrations, supplied the fullest surviving account in his 1868 recollections. According to Latrobe, Baltimore stage proprietors (as in stagecoach), Stockton & Stokes supplied a powerful gray horse. The horse initially led Then Cooper’s locomotive caught and passed it. The blower belt on the Tom Thumb slipped, Cooper injured his hands attempting to restore it. The horse-drawn car took the lead and ultimately finished ahead. Edward C. Mack later relied heavily on Latrobe’s account in his book.
Peter Cooper independently remembered that some form of contest occurred. In his later recollection, he dismissed it almost casually. They had tried “a little race,” and the locomotive had gotten out of gear. Raymond’s biography preserves Cooper’s response as well as a September date for the contest.
The restored engraving (shown above) captures the essence of the race on August 28, 1830. It is reprinted from "history of the first locomotives in America" by William H Brown in 1877, "On the way back from another run, the Tom Thumb, Peter Cooper at the controls, raced a horse, got the lead, but lost when a fan belt slipped."
The exact date remains less certain than the event itself. Our Ellicott City chronology places the contest during the September 20, 1830 testing, while Raymond gives September 18 and other later retellings have merged it with the better-documented August 28 run.
For purposes of this series, we believe the September testing sequence best explains what was happening.
The locomotive was still being tested.
Horses were already present because horse power was how the B&O was operating its railroad. The company was already using horses and mules on the first thirteen miles, and the available evidence places a testing interest directly in the race story.
That makes the absence of advance newspaper publicity much easier to understand.
This appears not to have been a staged public promotion. It looks much more like a practical comparison.
Someone had the locomotive. Someone had a fast horse.
The B&O still depended upon animal power. Why not put them alongside one another and see what happened?
The Horse Was the Benchmark
Seen that way, the race becomes more important, not less.
The horse was not merely an opponent in an entertaining sporting contest.
The horse represented the B&O’s incumbent technology.
The railroad already knew what horses could do. It understood their speed, costs, limitations, feeding, care, relays and operating requirements.
Steam was the unknown.
So the important question was not simply:
Which one is faster?
It was:
Which technology gives this railroad the better future?
The B&O was already beginning to think in exactly those terms. Its early reports compared motive power in terms of speed, capacity and economy. By 1832, the railroad’s Atlantic locomotive was being subjected to continuous operating service between Baltimore and the inclined planes at Parr’s Ridge. That distance is forty miles each way and its fuel, crew, maintenance and operating costs were being recorded.
That is the business story behind the engineering story.
The Tom Thumb did not merely cause the B&O to wonder whether steam locomotion was mechanically possible.
It allowed the company to begin asking a much more valuable question:
How could steam make the railroad a better business?
The Tom Thumb Answered a Really Important Question — Not All of Them
Cooper’s little locomotive demonstrated that steam could operate successfully over the railroad between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills.
It could negotiate the curves.
It could climb the grades encountered there.
It could carry passengers.
It could operate at speeds that made locomotive power worth pursuing.
Ross Winans’s August 28 report went even further. He concluded that the experiments established the practicality of using locomotive steam power for passengers and goods with satisfactory speed, safety and economy. The grades encountered in those experiments, however, were on the order of roughly thirteen to twenty feet per mile.
That distinction matters.
The Tom Thumb answered a really important question, nut not all of them.
After Cooper, the B&O could begin shifting its attention from simple proof of concept toward performance and economics:
How much could a locomotive haul?
How fast?
How reliably?
At what operating cost?
How many passengers and how much freight could the railroad move?
How frequently could trains operate?
Could locomotive power increase the railroad’s capacity without requiring proportionate increases in horses, stables, feed, handlers and relays?
And perhaps most importantly:
Could better technology allow the B&O to keep growing west?
That last question soon became far more difficult than anything Cooper had faced between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills.
Ellicott’s Mills Was Only the First Thirteen Miles
The railroad was not called the Baltimore & Ellicott’s Mills.
It was the Baltimore & Ohio.
Its founders intended to reach the western trade.
And the farther west the railroad moved, the more demanding the geography became.
The next major obstacle was Parr’s Ridge near Mount Airy, the divide between the Patapsco and Potomac watersheds.
The original railroad crossed the ridge using four inclined planes, two on each side of the ridge. The 1853 history of the B&O states that these planes were intended for stationary steam power. The steepest approached roughly 360 feet of rise per mile.
Nothing Cooper had done in 1830 suggested that his experimental engine, or the locomotive technology represented by it, could handle anything remotely like that in practical railroad service.
This is where the Tom Thumb story needs an important correction.
The success of Cooper’s experiment did not mean the B&O had solved locomotive transportation.
It meant locomotive transportation was worth continuing to solve.
And it would take years.
The railroad initially dealt with the Parr’s Ridge problem using inclined planes and horse power. By January 1838, the B&O had replaced the planes with a new route around the ridge. The 1853 history reported that eliminating them reduced annual transportation costs at that location by more than $20,000.
That is a perfect example of the engineering and business problem becoming one and the same.
A better route reduced operating cost.
A more capable locomotive increased useful capacity.
A better railroad became a more efficient business.
The B&O Opens the Problem to American Inventors
Peter Cooper did not become the B&O’s locomotive manufacturer.
Instead, the railroad effectively threw the problem open to American mechanical talent.
On January 4, 1831, the B&O advertised prizes for locomotives capable of meeting its requirements. Prizes included $4,000 for first place, and $3,500 for second, under the terms reported by Sagle.
Office of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company
4th January, 1831.
The Baltirrrore and Ohio Rail Road Company being desirous of obtaining a supply of Locomotive Engines of American manufacture, adapted to their road, the President and Directors hereby give public notice, that they will pay the sum of Four Thousand Dollars for the most approved EngIne, which shall be delivered for trial upon the road on or before the Ist of June, 1831 – and that they will also pay Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollars for the Egine which shall be adjudged the next best and be delivered as aforesaid, subject to the following conditions, to wit:
1. The Engine must burn coke or coal and must consame its own smoke.
2. The Engine, when in operation mast not exceed three and one-half tons weight, and must, on a level road, be capable of drawing day by day, fifteen tons, inclusive of the weight of the wagons, fifteen miles per hour . . .
. . .
9. The Endnes which may appear to offer the greatest advantages will be subjected to the performance of thirty days regular work on the road; at the end of which time, if they shall have proved durable and continue to be capable of performing agreeable to their first exhibition, as aforesaid, they will be received and paid for as here stipulated.
P. E. Thomas, President.
N .B. The Rail Road Company will provide and will furnish a tender and supply of water and fuel for trial.
Persons desirous of examining the road or of obtaining more minute information, are invited to address themselves to the President of the Company. The least radius of curvature of the road is 400 feet. Competitors who arrive with their engines before the first of June, will be allowed to make experiments on the road to that day.
This solicitation was posted in National Gazette (Philadelphia), Commercial Advertiser (New York), and Pittsburgh Statesman once a week for four weeks.
The approach naturally invites comparison with Britain’s famous Rainhill Trials of 1829, where the Liverpool & Manchester Railway had tested competing locomotive designs. Ross Winans had been in England during this formative period and witnessed British railroad experimentation firsthand.
But the B&O could not simply import the British answer.
Its railroad was different.
Its curves were sharper.
Its track was different.
Its grades would become more severe.
Its fuel situation was different.
And its western ambitions would eventually demand locomotives capable of hauling heavy loads through terrain unlike anything being encountered on the earliest English lines.
The B&O needed American solutions.
Phineas Davis and the York
The locomotive contest produced an important new figure: Phineas Davis of York, Pennsylvania.
Davis and Israel Gartner entered the locomotive that became known as the York. It won the B&O competition, although even the winning machine was not a final answer. Later accounts describe it as weighing only about three and one-half tons and being too light for advantageous regular service on rising grades.
That is exactly the point.
The B&O did not hold one contest, discover the perfect locomotive, and stop experimenting.
The York led to something better.
Davis and Gartner followed with the Atlantic, a larger and more capable locomotive. By 1832 the Atlantic was performing daily passenger service between Baltimore and Parr’s Ridge, covering approximately eighty miles on a round trip.
Other designs followed — Traveller, Arabian, Mercury and the family of locomotives eventually remembered as the Grasshoppers.
The evolution was rapid.
And it did not belong to one inventor.
From Cooper to Davis to Winans
One of the most interesting features of early B&O locomotive development is how quickly one person’s experiment became another person’s starting point.
Peter Cooper demonstrated feasibility.
Phineas Davis developed practical locomotive designs.
Ross Winans helped analyze, modify and improve them.
George Gillingham became an important part of the machinery operation.
Later engineers and locomotive builders introduced still other solutions.
After Davis’s death in 1835, Gillingham and Winans took over the B&O’s Mount Clare shops under an arrangement that allowed them to manufacture locomotives and railroad machinery while giving the B&O priority.
Winans became particularly important.
He had already reported on Cooper’s locomotive in 1830. Bell identifies him as Assistant Engineer of Machinery in the B&O’s 1831 report, and after Davis’s death he became increasingly important in the development of B&O motive power.
The Grasshopper design evolved.
Then came the Crab locomotives.
Then larger freight engines, including the Camel.
Different wheel arrangements, boilers, gearing, fuel systems and suspension arrangements were tried.
Some worked.
Some only partly worked.
Some failed.
And that was precisely the point.
Mount Clare Becomes a Laboratory
By the middle of the decade, something larger than a succession of locomotives was taking shape.
The B&O was developing a culture of experimentation, which drove innovation.
This is not merely a modern interpretation imposed backward on the railroad.
In 1835, the American Railroad Journal praised the B&O for openly publishing the results of its experiments, including its mistakes, so that others could learn from them. It famously called the company the “Railroad University of the United States.” Its reports went out as textbooks, while the railroad and its workshops effectively served as a lecture room for people learning the new technology.
That description captures what happened after the Tom Thumb better than the familiar story of one miraculous locomotive.
The B&O was learning by doing.
Test. Measure. Fail. Modify. Test again.
That process extended far beyond locomotives.
Track construction changed.
Passenger cars changed.
Freight cars changed.
Suspension changed.
Wheel arrangements changed.
Fuel systems changed.
Routes changed.
And the railroad increasingly evaluated those technical choices in terms of the business they made possible.
Mack’s reconstruction says that by 1834 the B&O already had seven locomotives, thirty-four passenger cars and approximately one thousand freight cars.
Four years earlier, Cooper had been trying to prove that one tiny experimental locomotive could make it around the curves to Ellicott’s Mills.
What Happened to Peter Cooper?
Here lies another misconception worth correcting.
The Tom Thumb did not launch Peter Cooper into the locomotive-manufacturing business.
Once his experiment had served its purpose, Cooper largely stepped away from locomotive development.
That was consistent with the purpose he himself later described. Cooper said he had not intended the machine for actual service; he wanted to show the B&O directors what could be done.
His motives were also unmistakably commercial.
Cooper had invested heavily in approximately 3,000 acres along Baltimore’s eastern waterfront. In his 1882 recollection he was remarkably candid. Stating that his land speculation depended upon the railroad succeeding. He needed the B&O to “go."
The Tom Thumb therefore sits at an interesting intersection of invention and entrepreneurship.
Cooper was helping the B&O solve its problem.
But solving the B&O’s problem also helped protect his own investment.
That did not mean everything in Baltimore worked out beautifully for him.
Mack’s research shows that Cooper sold his Canton property in 1832, although he retained his Baltimore ironworks until selling them to Horace Abbott in 1847. His Baltimore holdings involved years of financial and personal complications.
Yet Cooper continued moving forward.
His glue business had already become the foundation of his wealth. He expanded deeply into iron. Raymond later described Cooper’s involvement in rolling mills, rail manufacture, blast furnaces, mines and the great Trenton Iron Works, as Cooper and his associates became major figures in American iron production.
He invested in still other technologies, including the transatlantic telegraph effort.
The pattern is recognizable.
Identify a problem.
Understand the opportunity surrounding it.
Experiment.
Prove something useful.
Invest.
Then move to the next opportunity.
The Tom Thumb was not the source of all of Peter Cooper’s later success.
But it was an unusually visible early example of the way he operated.
From Industrialist to Cooper Union
Cooper’s later prominence ultimately rested on much more than the locomotive.
One of his deepest concerns was education.
He had received very little formal schooling himself and had long imagined an institution that would provide practical education to working people.
That ambition became The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
In April 1859, the State of New York approved the institution’s charter and Cooper conveyed the property in trust to be permanently devoted to the advancement of science and art and their useful application.
Peter Cooper's educational legacy extended beyond the institution he founded in 1859. His granddaughters, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, established a museum of decorative arts at Cooper Union in 1897 to advance the study of art and design. That museum eventually became the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, now housed in Andrew Carnegie's former Manhattan mansion. A fitting connection between two great American industrialists who believed that wealth should be used to expand educational opportunity.
There is also an appealing connection between that later achievement and the B&O story.
Cooper valued practical knowledge.
He learned by making things.
He crossed disciplinary boundaries easily.
He moved between mechanics, manufacturing, investment and public purpose.
The same man who improvised a tiny locomotive to demonstrate a principle eventually devoted a substantial portion of his fortune to giving others access to practical education.
Cooper’s reputation as an inventor also endured well beyond his lifetime. In 2006, Peter Cooper was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on the steam boiler fire-box. The Hall also recognizes his broader accomplishments in invention, industrial development and education.
That later recognition should not be mistaken for evidence that the Tom Thumb itself became a regular-service locomotive. Cooper explicitly said it was an experimental demonstration machine.
But it does help place the episode in the much larger arc of his life.
The Tom Thumb became famous.
Peter Cooper became far more than the Tom Thumb.
The Original Tom Thumb Disappears
The original machine did not survive.
No complete set of original construction drawings is known to exist, and later historians had to reconstruct its appearance from recollections, sketches and scattered technical descriptions. Sagle emphasized just how uncertain many of its dimensions and mechanical details remained.
That uncertainty eventually created another chapter in the Tom Thumb story.
The locomotive had disappeared.
But Americans wanted to see it.
So they began recreating it.
The 1893 Tom Thumb: Reconstructing a Lost Beginning
For the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, B&O representative Major Joseph G. Pangborn assembled an enormous historical railroad exhibit.
Pangborn and his team researched early locomotives in both the United States and Europe and produced a collection of full-size historical models.
Among them was the Tom Thumb.
Sagle traced the familiar later reproductions back to this 1893 effort and emphasized that Pangborn was reconstructing a machine for which no complete original design record survived.
That distinction is important.
The Pangborn Tom Thumb is not Peter Cooper’s locomotive.
It is a nineteenth-century attempt to reconstruct Peter Cooper’s locomotive.
And because it was created only sixty-three years after Cooper’s experiments, it is itself now an important historic artifact.
It's also important because unlike the original, it can still be seen, experienced, and appreciated (now back on display after 23 years) at the B&O Ellicott City Station and Museum).
The Tom Thumb That Could Move
The B&O returned to its beginnings again as the railroad approached its centennial.
In 1926–1927, the railroad created the operating Tom Thumb reproduction that became familiar to generations of railroad enthusiasts and that was featured in the B&O’s 1927 Fair of the Iron Horse.
But this machine had a different requirement.
It had to run.
That meant it could not simply reproduce every uncertain feature of the tiny experimental locomotive described by Cooper, Latrobe and Winans.
Sagle compared the estimated original, the Pangborn model and the operating reproduction and found substantial dimensional differences. The later reproduction was made heavier and more robust so that it could operate safely and reliably.
That gives us a useful way to understand the two surviving interpretations:
The 1893 Tom Thumb was made primarily to show people what the original may have looked like.
The 1926–1927 Tom Thumb was made to let people experience the idea in motion.
This one can also still seen, experienced, and appreciated (still on display) at the National Museum of Railroad History and Innovation in Baltimore.
Neither is the original.
Both helped create the legend.
How an Experiment Became an Icon
And that brings us back to the horse.
The event most Americans remember from the Tom Thumb story is a race the locomotive apparently lost.
Yet the B&O did not return to a future powered entirely by horses.
It moved toward steam.
Not immediately.
Not smoothly.
And certainly not because one tiny locomotive solved every problem.
The Tom Thumb proved that steam deserved to remain in the conversation.
The locomotive competition searched for something better.
Phineas Davis improved the answer.
Ross Winans and others improved it again.
Parr’s Ridge exposed new limitations.
The railroad changed its locomotives.
It changed its track.
It changed its routes.
And Mount Clare became part workshop, part laboratory and part school for an industry that barely existed when Peter Cooper arrived.
That may be the most important legacy of the Tom Thumb.
It did not give the B&O its locomotive.
It helped the B&O learn how to develop one.
And it also allowed the railroad to begin looking beyond the question of whether steam could work toward the larger business questions that would ultimately matter more:
How do we move more people?
How do we move more freight?
How do we do it faster?
How do we do it more reliably?
How do we lower the cost?
How do we extend the railroad into new markets?
And what must we invent next to make all of that possible?
The original Tom Thumb eventually disappeared.
Peter Cooper moved on.
The B&O moved west.
The horse race became legend.
But the process the little locomotive helped begin. Experiment > Measure > Improve > Try Again, became embedded in the story of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Nearly two centuries later, we still remember the Tom Thumb not because it was the locomotive that solved American railroading.
We remember it because it helped demonstrate what might be possible.
And sometimes, that is how revolutions really begin.
See the Tom Thumb Today
The original Tom Thumb is gone, but two important later interpretations of Cooper’s locomotive can still be seen today.
At the B&O Ellicott City Station Museum, visitors can see the 1893 Joseph G. Pangborn full-size wooden model, created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is the oldest surviving full-size reconstruction of the Tom Thumb and an artifact in its own right. A nineteenth-century attempt to recover the appearance of a locomotive that had already disappeared.
A very different Tom Thumb can be seen at Baltimore’s National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation, formerly the B&O Railroad Museum. There, the 1926–1927 operating reproduction represents the B&O’s effort to bring the locomotive back to life for public exhibition. Unlike the Pangborn model, it was enlarged and strengthened so that it could actually operate. The museum stands on the historic Mount Clare grounds where
Cooper’s original experiment took shape.
Together, the two replicas tell almost as interesting a story as the lost locomotive itself:
One was built to help people see the Tom Thumb.
The other was built to let them experience it in motion.
And today, visitors can encounter both ends of the story — Ellicott’s Mills, where Cooper demonstrated what his tiny locomotive could do, and Mount Clare, where American locomotive experimentation was taking shape.
The original may be gone.
But the experiment, and the places where it happened, are still remarkably close at hand.
The Tom Thumb and the Road to Ellicott’s Mills Series
PART 1 OF 4
PART 2 OF 4
PART 3 OF 4
PART 4 OF 4
BONUS
Sources and Bibliography
Bell, J. Snowden. The Early Motive Power of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. New York: Angus Sinclair Co., 1912. Particularly useful for the August 28, 1830 Winans report; the 1831 locomotive competition; the York, Atlantic, Grasshopper and Crab locomotives; Ross Winans; and the development of B&O motive power.
Cooper, Peter. “A Recollection of the ‘Tom Thumb.’” Letter to the Boston Herald, 1882. Cooper’s late first-person account of his Baltimore investment, reasons for building the locomotive, construction and operating experiments.
Hungerford, Edward. The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 1827–1927, Vol. 1. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928. Used throughout the earlier installments for the opening of the railroad, early locomotive experiments and B&O institutional history.
Mack, Edward C. Peter Cooper: Citizen of New York. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949, Chapter 7, “The Tom Thumb,” and chapter notes. Previously examined through a controlled Internet Archive loan; the Mack-only RHR research note preserves his documentary reconstruction, treatment of the horse race and account of Cooper’s Canton interests.
Raymond, Rossiter W. Peter Cooper. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1901. Valuable for Cooper’s later recollections, the horse-race account, his subsequent industrial career and the development of Cooper Union.
Brown, William H. History of the First Locomotives in America,1877. Used for photo engraving restoration and event reconstruction context.
Sagle, Lawrence W. “The Tom Thumb: Little Known Facts About First Locomotive Built in America Slowly Come to Light.” Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 73, May 1948, pp. 46–53. Particularly useful for the Cooper-Latrobe-Winans evidence and comparison of the original locomotive, Pangborn model and operating reproduction.
Smith, W. P. (“A Citizen of Baltimore”). A History and Description of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1853. RHR-BL088. Important for Parr’s Ridge, the inclined planes, subsequent route changes and the developing machinery operation.
Stakem, Patrick H. Ross Winans, an Ingenious Mechanic of Baltimore. 2016. RHR-BL161. Used particularly for Winans, Rainhill context, Davis locomotive development, Mount Clare and later Parr’s Ridge developments.
“Baltimore and Ohio Railroad — Locomotive Engines.” American Railroad Journal. Near-contemporary evidence concerning locomotive performance on severe grades and the B&O’s deliberate development of American locomotive technology.
Brown, Robert R. “Pioneer Locomotives of North America.” Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 101, October 1959. Useful for the 1831 B&O locomotive contest and succession of early B&O locomotive types.
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Book of the Royal Blue, selected issues, 1897–1911. Later B&O historical material concerning its early motive-power history. RHR-
National Inventors Hall of Fame. “Peter Cooper — Steam Boiler Fire-Box.” Inducted 2006. Official inductee biography. Used for Cooper’s later recognition as an inventor and broader technological legacy.
