What was so ground-breaking (and history making) about the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad?
There are two answers: Its sheer size, and its status as a landmark in the transformation of corporations. At the time of the Civil War, there were only a handful of corporations with an official, or par, value of $10 million or more. All were railroads, with most manufacturing firms valued at $1 million or (usually) much less. When Vanderbilt merged the New York Central and Hudson River Railroads in 1870, he created an entity with a capital stock worth nearly $100 million, far larger than all but one or two other railroads. It marked the birth of big business: It employed thousands, conducted operations from one end of New York to the other, and loomed as the largest single enterprise in virtually every major city in the state. But it also marked an end to a longstanding idea of what the corporation was for. They were devices established by state governments to encourage public parties to invest their capital in public projects; the first railroads, for example, had been chartered to
