Lackawanna Valley, Pennsylvania This 1856 portrait of Lackawanna Valley, Pennsylvania—painted by the famous American artist George Innes—depicts the environmental transformation wrought by the railroad. A young man reclines on a hillside overlooking a denuded field littered with tree stumps and cut through by an old dirt road, while contemplating the locomotive pulling a massive train of freight cars away from Scranton, Pennsylvania (to the left of the dirt road leading to the horizon). The giant railroad roundhouse (center background) and the smokestacks of factories contrast industrial might with the placid orchard (the grove of uniform trees on the right) and the not-yet-cut forest. The painting hints at both the benefits and costs of technological progress in the 1850s.

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.