ABSTRACT
The Civil War opened upper-class doors to the successful members of the business, industrial, and banking elite. The Civil War ushered in the railroad age in America. After the war, Thomas A. Scott played a major role in expanding the Pennsylvania system. Any discussion of Pennsylvania Railroad families would be incomplete without including Henry Howard Houston, one of Philadelphia's great family founders and public benefactors. The Anderson family were pioneers in the early days of the oil industry in Titusville. In 1880, Young Joseph Newton Pew founded the Sun Oil Company which has grown into one of the largest family-owned concerns in its field. Rapid urban growth followed the industrialization of America during the last years of the nineteenth century. As the commercial and industrial masses were no longer able to walk from home to factory and office, Philadelphia became a "trolley-car city."
