Incorporating the Carthage Burlington Railroad Company

After a little searching on GoogleBooks, I had it: the Act incorporating the Carthage Burlington Railroad for which I recently purchased a blank certificate on Ebay. 

Creating citations for things I find on GoogleBooks sometimes takes time which (to be honest) I usually don't want to spend at the time I'm locating the information. The site doesn't always include the most accurate description of the book in it's "catalog" entry.

For this reason I have taken to simply making an image of the title page as shown above. In hindsight, I should have added a comment at the bottom that it was obtained digitally on GoogleBooks along with the date of download.

The next image contains the first part of the Act that authorized the organization of the railroad in 1867. I usually try and include a page number in these images if I can. It was easy enough in this case.

The act does name the individuals who are in charge of setting up the rail line. I'm not familiar with any of them and if they were residents of the area, I don't know (my own family was never involved in anything requiring this much capital or political clout--grin!). The Act goes into more details about the organization, record keeping, and financing of the railroad.

Individual townships could purchase stock in the company (after the railroad had partially built it's facilities and had no debt on those facilities). But only certain townships were mentioned as shown on page 625 of the act

These townships are all in the northern portion of Hancock County. I'm not certain why southern townships were not included as the railroad would have had to have passed through other townships in order to get to Quincy. The track would have passed through Henderson, Hancock, and Adams Counties. Six townships in Henderson County are also given the authority to (upon voter approval as in Hancock County) purchase stock. Adams County is not mentioned in the Act at all. I don't have an answer to that, but did find it interesting.

The genealogy takeaway from this is to make certain you save images in a fashion that includes documentation. The other takeaway is that there have always been politics, which may be the reason that the southern half of Hancock County and the entire portion of Adams County where the line passed through are not mentioned.