The City the Railroad Made and Renamed
Near Modesto, California
Modesto exists because of a decision made by a railroad company in a particular month of a particular year.
Before October of eighteen seventy, there was no Modesto. There was a settlement called Paradise City, a few miles west, and there was Tuolumne City, a few miles east, both of them strung along the waterways and roads that preceded the railroad. When the Central Pacific completed its line through the San Joaquin Valley and established a depot at the Tuolumne River crossing, the residents of those earlier communities made a pragmatic choice. They picked up their buildings and moved them to the new town.
Not metaphorically. Accounts from the period describe actual structures being relocated to the site of the new railroad depot. A town that had not existed in September of eighteen seventy had more than a thousand residents by the time it incorporated as a city in August of eighteen eighty-four.
The railroad was not purely a gift. The Central Pacific and its successor the Southern Pacific maintained a monopoly on rail transport through the valley for decades, setting freight rates that farmers and ranchers had no alternative but to accept. The political movement against the Southern Pacific monopoly was one of the dominant themes of California politics from the eighteen eighties through the early nineteen hundreds, producing the Progressive Era reforms that reshaped state government.
The second railroad, the Stockton-to-Bakersfield line built between eighteen ninety-five and eighteen ninety-eight, challenged that monopoly and put pressure on freight rates. For Modesto's agricultural economy, the competitive rate structure that followed made a significant difference in the economics of shipping perishable crops to distant markets.
What remained after the railroad monopoly era, the grid of streets, the downtown core, the depot itself, still define the shape of the city. The railroad made the town, and the town outlasted the railroad's dominance in ways the original Central Pacific surveyors would not have predicted.
