Granite Railway, Our Country’s First Railroad

Last revised: September 14, 2026

The Granite Railway of Quincy, Massachusetts, is the first railroad in the United States that was chartered, built, and put to work. The Massachusetts legislature granted the company on March 4, 1826. Gridley Bryant broke ground April 1. On October 7, 1826 the first train of cars ran the whole three miles from the West Quincy quarries to a dock on the Neponset River at Milton. Horses pulled them. The stone went by barge to Charlestown for the Bunker Hill Monument. Gauge was five feet. It was not a common carrier, and it was not the first railroad anyone had put on paper. Colonel John Stevens’s 1815 New Jersey company never laid a rail. The first American common carrier is the Baltimore & Ohio. This page is the Quincy quarry road.

What follows here is Bryant’s three miles, the incline, the cars, and what the Old Colony and the New Haven later did with the right-of-way.

Granite Railway preserved incline and obelisk monument in Quincy Massachusetts April 1934

A view of the Granite Railway’s preserved incline and obelisk monument in April 1934.

On this page: At a glance · Charter and Bunker Hill stone · Bryant’s road · The incline · What Bryant built · Old Colony and the New Haven · What remains

At a glance

Item	Detail
What it was	First commercial railroad in the United States actually built and operated. Horse-powered quarry road, not a common carrier
Charter	March 4, 1826. Petition dated January 4, 1826
Opened	October 7, 1826. Construction from April 1
Route	West Quincy (Furnace / Bunker Hill Quarry) to a Neponset River wharf at Milton. About 3 miles of main line; Bryant later put the whole plant, branches included, at about 4
Gauge	5 feet
Power	Horses until the Old Colony rebuilt the right-of-way. No steam on the original plant
First cost	About $50,000 for the road (Bryant). Wharf on the Neponset about $30,000
Incline	1830, Pine Hill / Pine Ledge quarry. 315 feet long, 84 feet of rise
Old Colony	Took the right-of-way 1871 (Old Colony and Newport). Steam and T-rail. No Old Colony leaf on this site
New Haven	Absorbed the Old Colony 1893. Granite Branch / West Quincy Branch. Company encyclopedia New Haven

Dates from Bryant’s 1859 letter to Charles B. Stuart, the Massachusetts charter, and James E. Lee in Trains, April 1975. Information compiled September 14, 2026.

Charter and Bunker Hill stone

Solomon Willard picked Quincy granite for the Bunker Hill Monument after looking over New England in 1825. The monument association had already formed; the cornerstone went down June 17, 1825, with Lafayette present. The quarry sat nearly four miles from water. Hauling that stone by road was the problem. Bryant took the idea of a railroad to Thomas Handasyd Perkins, William Sullivan, Amos Lawrence, Isaac T. Davis, and David Moody. Perkins, a Boston merchant and legislator, put up the money, took most of the stock, and became president. The others, Bryant later wrote, thought the project visionary and never paid assessments.

The petition of January 4, 1826, asked the General Court to incorporate The Granite Railway Company so the subscribers could build a railway from certain Quincy quarries to tidewater for carrying stone. The signers were Perkins, Sullivan, Lawrence, Willard, Moody, and Bryant. The House fought it. Bryant remembered the questions: what did anyone know about railroads, and was it right to take people’s land for a thing nobody had heard of. The charter passed March 4 by a small majority, with eminent domain for the right-of-way. It was not Stevens’s 1815 New Jersey paper company, which never built. New Jersey’s first railroad that actually ran is the Camden & Amboy.

Bryant’s road

Bryant surveyed more than one line from the Bunker Hill Quarry to the nearest tidewater and settled on the Milton dock. Deepest cut was 15 feet; highest fill 12 feet. Grades ran 13, 26, and 66 feet to the mile before the tableland at the quarry. The track was stone sleepers eight feet apart, wooden rails six inches by twelve, and iron plates three inches wide and a quarter-inch thick spiked on top. At public-road crossings the rails themselves were granite, with heavier iron. Gauge was five feet. England already had the Stockton & Darlington. Bryant used what he needed and sized the plant for New England frost and for blocks that weighed tons.

The first car cost $600. It had wheels six and a half feet in diameter. The load hung on a platform under the axles, raised and lowered by machinery on the car, so a six-ton stone could be picked up in the quarry and set down at the wharf. Average loads were about six tons. Later trucks sat on low wheels with axles five feet apart, the gauge of the road. Two of those trucks made an eight-wheel car; more trucks made a sixteen-wheel car for the biggest blocks. John H. White, Jr., treated those hanging-platform wagons as the ancestor of the American freight car. The freight-car encyclopedia is freight cars. Strap iron and stone sleepers are a date on infrastructure.

There was no locomotive. Horses walked the three miles. In winter the cars carried a form of snowplow. From Milton, barges took the granite down the Neponset to Charlestown. The monument was dedicated June 17, 1843. By then the quarry had become a business of its own, and the railroad stayed busy hauling stone that had nothing to do with Breed’s Hill. Tourists came out from Boston to look. Daniel Webster had been in the monument association’s circle. Fanny Kemble wrote the railway into her 1833 journal.

By 1837 the wooden rails were gone. Bryant replaced them with granite rails, iron-capped again. The five-foot gauge and the horses stayed.

The incline

In 1830 Bryant added a branch to the Pine Hill (Pine Ledge) quarry. The drop was 84 feet. He built an inclined plane 315 feet long, about 15 degrees, with a double track and an endless chain. Loaded cars came down; empties went up. At the head he put a swing platform, balanced by weights, that received a loaded car, dumped it, and returned to level on an eccentric cam. A self-acting guard kept the car from rolling off. At the foot of the quarry he built a turntable that, he wrote in 1859, was still in use as originally constructed.

Granite Railway preserved incline in Quincy Massachusetts April 1934

Another view of the railroad’s preserved incline in April 1934.

On July 25, 1832 a cable broke as an empty car carrying four visitors climbed the incline. The car went over a drop of about 35 feet. Thomas B. Achuas of Cuba was killed; the other three were badly injured. It is one of the first fatal railroad accidents in the United States. The incline itself kept working. In the twentieth century metal channels went over the old granite rails and trucks rode the chain. That use lasted into the 1940s.

What Bryant built

The Granite Railway is credited with a turnout (switch, or frog), a turntable, the portable derrick, and the double-truck freight car. Bryant never patented them. He said they should be for everyone. A Granite Railway frog later sat at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Baltimore & Ohio men came to look before they built their own road. How much of that list is a true first, and how much is Bryant adapting English practice to a heavier American load, is a historians’ argument. The 1826 plant is not in dispute: it ran, it moved stone, and it was here first.

Old Colony and the New Haven

The original horse railway, on Bryant’s granite and strap iron, lasted into the late 1860s. In 1871 the Old Colony and Newport Railway took the right-of-way, laid conventional T-rail on wooden ties, and gauged it to 4 feet 8½ inches. Steam locomotives replaced the horses. Stone could go to Boston by rail. The barges were no longer the only way off the Neponset. There is no Old Colony encyclopedia on this site; that company is a date here.

The New Haven took the Old Colony in 1893. Under the New York, New Haven & Hartford the line was the Granite Branch, or West Quincy Branch. Passenger service ended September 30, 1940. Freight was cut back from 1941 and gone by 1973. Most of the right-of-way through Quincy and Milton went under the Southeast Expressway. A short industrial stub at Granite Junction, off the Old Colony main, is the last iron. The New Haven as a company is the New Haven.

What remains

The incline was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 19, 1973. A surviving piece of the 1826 bed, off Bunker Hill Lane, followed on October 15. The American Society of Civil Engineers named the Granite Railway a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1976. A 1926 centennial plaque, a frog, a piece of rail, and a section of superstructure sit in the gardens over I-93 at East Milton Square, about where the railway once crossed the square. In Quincy, trails in the Blue Hills Reservation and the Quincy Quarries Reservation walk the old trestle and the incline. The Metropolitan District Commission bought 22 acres, including the Granite Railway Quarry, in 1985. The last active quarry had closed in 1963.

The founding decade that put this road, the B&O, the Delaware & Hudson, and the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road on the map is railroads in the 1820s and 1830s. Massachusetts as a state is Massachusetts. The Granite Railway is the first three miles: horses, five-foot gauge, and a monument that needed stone.

Sources

Bryant, Gridley. Letter to Charles B. Stuart, 1859, printed in Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1871), 121–24. Charter fight, April 1 start, October 7 first train, $50,000 first cost, 6½-foot wheels, hanging-platform car, incline, turntable, Perkins as the man who paid
Lee, James E. “America’s Very First Railroad: It Created A Monument.” Trains 25, no. 6 (April 1975): 28–32
White, John H., Jr. The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
Wood, Frederick J. The Turnpikes of New England. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919 (1837 granite rails; Old Colony reconstruction)
Karr, Ronald Dale. The Rail Lines of Southern New England, 2nd ed. Branch Line Press, 2017 (West Quincy Branch passenger end September 30, 1940; freight 1941–73)
National Register: Quincy Granite Railway Incline, June 19, 1973 (NRIS 73000310); Quincy Granite Railway, October 15, 1973 (NRIS 73000309). ASCE National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, 1976
Live American-Rails beginning, history, B&O, New Haven, freight, and infrastructure pages as linked above

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