Before the country's Civil War, 1861–65, any opera company attempting a tour traveled mostly by water, usually either by sea between the coastal cities (New Orleans to Boston), or if inland, up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers (New Orleans to Pittsburgh), making connections when needed (over the Appalachian Mountains) as often by canals or coaches as by railroads. Especially in the South and West, before the war, railroads frequently did not yet connect the larger cities because built primarily not to move people from place to place but to bring produce, coal, wheat, or cotton to market or to port for shipping. Even Chicago, for example, though by 1860 tied to the East by several railroads, was still more of a port on the Great Lakes than a railway hub because as yet no lines ran more than a few miles westward. Similarly, in the South, passage between New Orleans and Mobile, the latter a frequent side-stop for visiting opera stars and companies, was by sea, not railroad; and two inland capital cities, Jackson, Mississippi, and Montgomery, Alabama, still had no rail connection.

Though the war greatly stimulated railroad construction in the North and West and to some extent in the impoverished South, inland waterways nevertheless continued to be much used by people and freight. On the Hudson River, for example, steaming between New York and Albany, a seven-hour run, the Mary Powell, launched in 1861, and competing against the New York Central's four-hour train ride, continued in service until 1923. And on Long Island Sound, New York to Boston, before the lock-free Cape Cod Canal opened in 1914, the most important shipping line steamed to Fall River, Massachusetts, from which passengers could take a ninety-minute train ride to Boston. With the canal, the line offered direct overnight service between the two cities and by a journey many considered far more pleasant than the train. In early years the line's two prize ships, the Bristol and the Providence, each offered 220 staterooms and a total passenger capacity of 840, as well as holds for cargo, and often provided entertainment for the evening's voyage, usually a dance band.