PHOTO: Exporail, Canadian Pacific Company Fonds

In 1884, the Canadian government sent out a Canadian Pacific Railway locomotive exhibit to market the country's wide-open spaces and agricultural abundance, with the goal of encouraging citizens to settle in the sparsely populated northwest region. The train traveled throughout eastern Canada, stocked with plums, strawberries, squash, fine and coarse grains, and even potatoes that, as one contemporary account put it, "would send an Irishman into ecstasy." The road-show-on-rails drew 3,000 visitors a day, helping divert the flood of work-starved Canadians fleeing to the textile mills of New England.