“In the Time before Steam Engines: Stowe’s Oldtown Folks and Manliness” demonstrates how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks (1869) explores the changing concepts of manliness within the context of American industrialization. I rediscover the novel as a neglected masterpiece that reveals Stowe’s understanding of manliness as a social construction in her own time. The essay first discusses the influence of steam locomotives on perceptions of time and space and America’s industrialization in the nineteenth century as well as Stowe’s experience of and attitude toward railway travel. Against the backdrop of these historical and biographical contexts, I suggest that Stowe’s Oldtown Folks both draws upon and extends her redefinition of manhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), using emerging industrialism, particularly the steam engine, as a foil to illuminate her notion of true progress. Criticizing the ways in which American industrialization and the Civil War engendered aggressive and competitive masculinity, Stowe shows that it can be changed for the better. To this end, she presents male characters like Parson Avery and Sam Lawson as examples of a more compassionate and open-minded manhood that disappeared after machine-based industrialization altered the American landscape.