قراءة كتاب The Story of the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad
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The Story of the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad
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PREFACE
Some railroads, like some men, experience many of the ups and downs of life. They have their seasons of high prosperity, as well as those of deep depression. Such a road was the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh. In its forty years of life it ran a full gamut of railroad existence. Alternately it was one of the best railroads in creation; and one of the worst.
The author within these pages has endeavored to put plain fact plainly. He has written without malice—if anything, he still feels within his heart a burst of warm sentiment for the old R. W. & O.—and with every effort toward absolute impartiality in setting down these events that now are History. He bespeaks for his little book, kindness, consideration, even forbearance. And looks forward to the day when again he may take up his pen in the scribbling of another narrative such as this. It has been a task. But it has been a task of real fascination.
E. H.
A LIST OF THOSE WHO HAVE ASSISTED MATERIALLY IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS BOOK
| Richard C. Ellsworth | Canton | |
| Harold B. Johnson | Watertown | |
| Cornelius Christie | Syracuse | |
| Richard Holden | Watertown | |
| J. F. Maynard | Utica | |
| Dr. Charles H. Leete | Potsdam | |
| W. D. Hanchette | Watertown | |
| Richard T. Starsmeare | Kane, Pa. | |
| W. D. Carnes | Watertown | |
| Arthur G. Leonard | Chicago | |
| Robert Ward Davis | Rochester | |
| George W. Knowlton | Watertown | |
| L. S. Hungerford | Chicago | |
| Hon. Chauncey M. Depew | New York | |
| Elisha B. Powell | Oswego | |
| P. E. Crowley | New York | |
| Ira A. Place | New York | |
| F. E. McCormack | Corning | |
| Edgar Van Etten | Los Angeles | |
| D. C. Moon | Cleveland | |
| James H. Hustis | Boston | |
| F. W. Thompson | San Francisco | |
| Henry N. Rockwell | Albany | |
| Chas. H. Hungerford | Arlington, Vt. | |
| Charles Holcombe | Biloxi, Miss. |
CHAPTER I
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
In the late summer of 1836 the locomotive first reached Utica and a new era in the development of Central and Northern New York was begun.
For forty years before that time, however—in fact ever since the close of the War of the Revolution—there had been a steady and increasing trek of settlers into the heart of what was soon destined to become the richest as well as the most populous state of the Union. But its development was constantly retarded by the lack of proper transportation facilities. For while the valley of the Mohawk, the gradual portage just west of Rome and the way down to Oswego and Lake Ontario through Oneida Lake and its emptying waterways, formed the one natural passage in the whole United States of that day from the Atlantic seaboard to the Great Lakes and the little-known country beyond, it was by no means an easy pathway. Not even after the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company had builded its first crude masonry locks in the narrow natural impasse at Little Falls, so that the bateaux of the early settlers, which made the rest of the route in comparative ease, might pass through its one very difficult bottle-neck.
It was not until the coming of the Erie Canal, there in the second decade of the nineteenth century, that the route into the heart of New York from tidewater at Albany, was rendered a reasonably safe and (for that day) comfortable affair. With the completion of the Erie Canal, in 1827, there was immediately inaugurated a fleet of packet-boats; extremely swift in their day and generation and famed for many a day thereafter for their comfortable cabins and the excellence of their meals.
But the comfort of these ancient craft should not be overrated. At the best they were but slow affairs indeed, taking three days to come from Albany, where they connected with the early steamboats upon the Hudson, up to Utica. And at the best they might operate but seven or eight months out of the year. The rest of the twelvemonth, the unlucky wight of a traveler must needs have recourse to a horse-drawn coach.
These selfsame coaches were not to be scoffed at, however. Across the central portion of New York; by relays all the way from Albany to Black Rock or Buffalo, they made a swift passage of it. And up into the great and little known North Country they sometimes made exceeding speed. That country had received its first artificial pathways at the time of the coming of the Second War with England, when it was thrust into a sudden and great strategic importance. With the direct result that important permanent highroads were at once constructed; from Utica north to the Black River country, down the water-shed of that stream, and through Watertown to Sackett’s Harbor; and from Sackett’s Harbor through
