Why didn't Erie, PA develop into a bigger city?

         Recently I had to travel up to Erie, PA for business.   It's about an hour north of me and is a rather small city, having just under 100 thousand people living in it.   It played an important role in the founding of America,  - where it was the headquarters for Oliver Perry's flagship Niagara during the battle of Like Erie in the war of 1812.  

   

    It was also a important shipping center, being Pennsylvania's only access to the Great Lakes which was the easiest way to trade with parts of Canada at the time as well as move goods to the cities of Detroit and Chicago, which in the mid to early 1800's were just starting to develop.  It was also directly north from Pittsburgh which was a major industrial city at that time.

    Yet Erie never really grew beyond it's humble beginnings and I wondered why.   Like any good sleuth I turned to the internet where I found mostly wrong answers.    Many people thought the port of Erie was to shallow to handle most shipping today, however at twenty nine feet deep it's actually two feet deeper then Chicago's, Detroit's and Buffalo's ports.  Both cities handle millions of dollars in shipping each year, so the port depth is not the reason.   There had to be another reason.

    Erie also is one of the few cities with a natural bay formed by Presque Isle, which would have served as a natural defense against storms and harsh winter weather.   It's overall weather is actually marginally better than places like Detroit, Chicago or Buffalo, so it seemed doubtful that nature could have played a role in it's lack of growth right?  

    Chicago owes a lot to the history of the railroad and it's rapid growth from a city of 4000 people when it was founded in 1837 to a city of 1000,000 just forty years later.  Erie's population in the 1870's was still around 20,000 people.   

    Erie has an interesting history with the railroads but I'll cover that shorty.   This is where geography starts to play a role.   Although the land around the great lakes themselves is flat, the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania made laying rail track expensive and time consuming.   Where out west, Chicago and Detroit had relativity flat prairie land to build on.   That fueled their rapid expansion and growth since supplies could be shipped out west quickly and cheaply not only from the east but from Canada as well.

    Still though, Erie had a deep natural port and the luck of lying between Buffalo, Cleveland and destinations out west.   Their were rail lines running directly through the city at the time, and although the city was starting to develop, it sill did not develop like it's larger neighbors were. 

    .  What is often lost to history is the war is that not rail lines were the same, that often in the early days their was no standardized track or "gauge;"  being the width between the rails.   This lead to the infamous Erie Gauge War, which was actually Erie business community thinking in the short term.   It was politicians trying to get reelected and about how the "little guy" often gets held back by the larger powers that be.  

    The Erie Gauge War, like most wars, was about money.

    Basically there were three railroads at the time that were shipping goods through Erie in a East - West direction.  You had the Erie and Northwest Railroad laying track eastward towards the New York border with a gauge of six-feet, they were an Erie based company.    At the same time, you had the Franklin Canal Company and the Buffalo and State line railways expanding westward towards Erie with a gauge of four feet and ten inches.   

    Erie basically ended up being a place where people had no choice but to change trains.   They needed places to stay overnight in some cases.  Restaurants, bars and other "entertainment" popped up all over and for a brief time the city boomed as freight had to be moved from one train to another. A lot of  money could be made at this "enforced stopping site."

    However the good times could not last as the Buffalo and State Railroad bought up roughly two-thirds of the land in and around Erie with the intention of replacing the six-foot gauge with their own rails.

    This resulted in the city of Erie barring the rail companies from crossing the streets with their trains to maintain the different gauges, and ensure that the money kept flowing in.   The city even went so far as to swear in 150 special police constables to help destroy a railroad bridge (which the city engineers oversaw).   

    In the nearby town of Harborcreek, the tracks were actually torn up.  Only to be replaced three days later by the railroad.   That very night they were town up again, this time the citizens in the area went so far as to plow over a level crossing and knock down a bridge.

    This, of course led to an injunction against the city of Erie and Harborcreek.   One of the city officials, upon being shown the seal of the United States on the injunction, supposedly threw it on the ground and stomped on it.  Declaring his heal mark was the seal of Harborcreek.  

    Eventually the "war" was settled and Erie did win some concessions, however it would still be decades before Pittsburgh steel was transported in any major amount out of the port of Erie.  The rail companies also were able to bypass the city of Erie to a great extent as well.

    At the time as well there was no Erie to Pittsburgh rail traffic, so no steel or coal or iron was being shipped out from Erie on a regular basis.  Erie and it's port was effective removed from the equations.  I highly recommend reading the Erie History Blog and Erie Yesterday for more information about this time in history.  Even the great Mark Twain wrote about it.  

    Erie was also missing one major ingredient that adds to the growth of a city.   A river.

    While it did provide access to Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, that was all it did.    Unlike the cities of Chicago, Cleveland or Detroit, there were no rivers or canals to ship goods into the interior quickly and cheaply.    While rail travel between Pittsburgh and Erie would eventually be established, it would occur after Erie had its chance to grow.  

    The city frankly "failed" in another way.   This was the time of the robber barons; the city of Erie never had it's Frick or Carnegie.  It never had it's Ford, it's Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.   Even the Erie and Northwest Railroad only managed about twenty miles of rail line at it's height, and were simply crashed by the larger companies at the time.  Without having someone in it's corner, it was simply bypassed by the powers that be at the time.