The story begins with the Bunker Hill Monument. In 1825, architect Solomon Willard searched throughout New England for the right granite to build the monument commemorating the Revolutionary War battle. He found it in Quincy, Massachusetts -- but the quarry sat nearly four miles from navigable water. The stone was too heavy for wagons on common roads. Gridley Bryant, who had served as master builder when the Marquis de Lafayette laid the monument's cornerstone on June 17, 1825, conceived the idea of a railway. He consulted Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a prominent Boston businessman and state legislator, who financed the venture and became president of the new Granite Railway Company. Bryant broke ground on April 1, 1826, and completed the line in just six months.

The railway's engineering was ingenious for its time. Stone sleepers were laid across the track eight feet apart. Wooden rails, six inches thick and twelve inches high, sat on top, capped with iron plates three inches wide and a quarter-inch thick. At road crossings, Bryant used stone rails instead of wood for durability, bolting half-inch iron plates on top. The first car had enormous wheels six and a half feet in diameter, with the load suspended on chains beneath the axles. Loads averaged six tons each. For heavier stones, Bryant connected multiple trucks with platforms and king bolts, creating eight-wheeled and even sixteen-wheeled cars. The gauge was five feet. Horses pulled the wagons, even though steam locomotives had been running in England for thirteen years. By 1837, the wooden rails were replaced with granite rails, still capped with iron.

Gridley Bryant invented several technologies on the Granite Railway that became fundamental to railroading: the railway switch (or frog), the turntable, and the double-truck railroad car. He never patented any of them. He believed his inventions should benefit everyone. In 1830, Bryant added the Incline, a 315-foot-long section at about fifteen degrees that hauled granite from the Pine Ledge Quarry to the railway level eighty-four feet below. Wagons moved up and down on an endless chain. He designed a self-acting guard that rose above the rail to prevent loaded cars from rolling over the edge, and a swing platform balanced by weights with gearing that always returned it to horizontal. The Incline continued operating until the 1940s -- more than a century of continuous use.

The novelty of the railroad drew sightseers from Boston eager to witness the new technology. Statesman Daniel Webster came. English actress Fanny Kemble visited in 1833 and described the experience in her journal. But on July 25, 1832, the railway became the site of one of the first fatal railroad accidents in the United States. Thomas B. Achuas of Cuba and three other tourists were riding a wagon up the Incline on the return leg of a tour when a cable snapped. The wagon derailed and the passengers were thrown over a cliff. Achuas was killed; the others were badly injured. It was a grim reminder that the technology transforming the country could also destroy lives.

In 1871, the Old Colony and Newport Railway absorbed the Granite Railway's original right-of-way and replaced its track with modern construction. Eventually, most of the route was buried beneath the Southeast Expressway. The last active quarry closed in 1963. Today, fragments remain. The railway's Incline was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and the American Society of Civil Engineers designated the Granite Railway a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1976. At East Milton Square, a centennial plaque from 1926, an original switch frog -- once displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago -- and a section of track sit in gardens atop Interstate 93, marking the approximate path of the railway. In Quincy, parkland trails wind past the quarries, most now filled with dirt from Boston's Big Dig project. The Quincy Quarries Reservation offers rock climbing and quiet paths connecting the remains of the railroad that helped build a nation's monument -- and proved that railroads could work in America.