THE BRISK PARSONS' REGIME
With the Black River thoroughly merged into his Rome, Watertown &
Ogdensburgh, Parsons began the extremely difficult job of the merging of
the personnel of the two lines. Britton, quite naturally, was not to be
disturbed. On the contrary, his authority was to be very greatly
increased. The U. & B. R. operating forces gave way to his domination. On
the other hand, Theodore Butterfield, who was recognized as a traffic man
of unusual astuteness and experience, was brought from Utica to Oswego and
made General Passenger Agent of the combined property. The shops were
merged. Most of the sixty-five workers of the Utica shop were also moved
to Oswego; it was retained only for the very lightest sort of repairs.
As soon as the arrangements could be made, the U. & B. R. passenger trains
were brought into the R. W. & O. stations at both Watertown and
Ogdensburgh; while the time-tables of the combined road were readjusted
so as to make Philadelphia, where the two former competing, main lines
crossed one another at right angles, a general point of traffic
interchange, similar to Richland. Cape Vincent lost, almost in a single
hour, the large railroad prestige that it had held for thirty-three long
years. To bind it more closely with the Thousand Island resorts, the
swift, new steamer, _St. Lawrence_, had been built at Clayton in the
summer of 1883, and at once crowned Queen of the River. Now the _St.
Lawrence_ was used in the Clayton-Alexandria Bay service exclusively. For
a number of years service was maintained intermittently between the Cape
and Alexandria Bay by a small steamer--generally the _J. F. Maynard_--but
after a time even this was abandoned. Until the coming of the motor-car
and improved state highways, Cape Vincent was all but marooned from the
busier portions of the river.
Clayton gradually was developed into a river gateway of importance. The
Golden Age of the Thousand Islands, during the season of huge summer
traffic--which lasted for nearly two decades--did not really begin until
about 1890. Yet by the mid-eighties it was beginning to blossom forth. The
Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh of that decade knew the value of
advertising. It adopted the four-leaved clover as its emblem--the long
stem served very well to carry the attenuated line that ran West from
Oswego to Rochester and to Niagara Falls--and made it a famous trade-mark
over the entire face of the land. It was emblazoned upon the sides of all
its freight-cars. Theodore E. Butterfield, the General Passenger Agent,
devised this interesting emblem for it. It was he who also chose the
French word, _bonheur_, for the clover stem. It was, as subsequent events
proved, a most fortuitous choice.
* * * * *
Charles Parsons, having merged the two important railroads of Northern New
York, was now engaged in rounding out his system as a complete and
well-contained unit. For more than a decade the Lake Ontario Shore
extension of the R. W. & O. had passed close to the city of Rochester
through the then village of Charlotte (now a ward of an enlarged
Rochester), and had touched that city only through indifferent connections
from Charlotte. Parsons, at Britton's suggestion, decided that the road
must have a direct entrance into Rochester; which already was beginning
its abounding and wonderful growth. The two men found their opportunity in
a small and sickly suburban railroad which ran down the east bank of the
Genesee from the northern limits of the city and over which there ran from
time to time a small train, propelled by an extremely small locomotive.
They easily acquired that road and gradually pushed it well into the heart
of the city; to a passenger and freight terminal in State Street, not far
from the famed Four Corners. To reach this terminal--upon the West Side of
the town--it was necessary to build a very high and tenuous bridge over
the deep gorge of the Genesee. This took nearly a year to construct.
Injunction proceedings had been brought against the construction of the R.
W. & O. into the heart of the city of Rochester. Yet, under the laws of
that time, these were ineffective upon the Sabbath day. Parsons took
advantage of this technical defect in the statutes, and on a Sabbath day
he successfully brought his railroad into its largest city.
In the meantime a fine, old-fashioned, brick residence in State Street had
been acquired for a Rochester passenger terminal. To make this building
serve as a passenger-station, and be in proper relation to the tracks, it
was necessary to change its position upon the tract of land that it
occupied. This was successfully done, and, I believe, was the record feat
at that time for the moving of a large, brick building. The bridge was
completed and the station opened for the regular use of passenger trains
in the fall of 1887.
* * * * *
At the same time that the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh was slipping so
stealthily into Rochester, it was building two other extensions; neither
of them of great length, but each of them of a considerable importance.
Away back in 1872 it had leased the Syracuse, Phoenix & New York--a
proposed competing line against the Lackawanna between Oswego and
Syracuse, which had been organized two or three years before--but the
project had been permitted to lie dormant. First it lacked the necessary
funds and then Samuel Sloan, quite naturally, could have no enthusiasm
over it. Parsons had no compunctions of that sort. The more he could dig
into Sloan the better he seemed to like it. Moreover the Syracuse, Phoenix
& New York involved very little actual track construction; only some
seventeen miles of track from Woodward's to Fulton, which was very little
for a thirty-seven mile line. From Woodward's into Syracuse it would use
the R. W. & O.'s own rails, put in long before, as the Syracuse Northern,
whilst from Fulton into Oswego the Ontario & Western was most glad to sell
trackage rights.
The seventeen-mile link was easily laid down; a sort of local summer
resort was created at Three River Point upon it, and five passenger trains
a day, in each direction, began service over it, between Syracuse and
Oswego in the early spring of 1886. In that same summer another extension
was also being builded; at the extreme northeastern corner of the
property. The Grand Trunk Railway had built a line with very direct and
short-distance Montreal connections, down across the international
boundary to Massena Springs, in St. Lawrence County--then a spa of
considerable repute, but destined to become a few years later, with the
development of the St. Lawrence water-power, an industrial community of
great standing in the North Country, second only to Watertown in size and
importance. To reach this new line, the R. W. & O. put down thirteen miles
of track from its long established terminus at Norwood, and moved that
terminal to Massena Springs. The right-of-way for the line was entirely
donated by the adjoining property-holders. For a time it was thought that
an important through route would be created through this new gateway,
which was opened in March, 1886, but somehow the traffic failed to
materialize. And to this day a rail journey from Watertown to Montreal
remains a portentous and a fearful thing. Yet the two cities are only
about 175 miles apart.
* * * * *
Parsons was, in heart and essence, a master of the strategy of railroad
traffic, as well as of railroad construction. Whilst he was making the
important link between Norwood and the Grand Trunk terminus at Massena
Springs, but thirteen miles distant, he was coquetting with the Central
Vermont--in one of its repeated stages of reorganization--for the better
development of its lines in connection with the Boston & Maine and the
Maine Central through to the Atlantic at Portland. In all of this he was
assisted by his two most capable assistants, E. M. Moore, General Freight
Agent, and Mr. Butterfield, the General Passenger Agent. Mr. Butterfield
we have already seen. He took very good care of the travel necessities of
the property. Mr. Moore had been with it for many years. He, too, was a
seasoned traffic man. More than this he was a maker of traffic men; from
his office came at least two experts in this specialty of railroad
salesmanship--H. D. Carter, who rose eventually to be Freight Traffic
Manager of the New York Central Lines, and Frank L. Wilson, who is to-day
their Division Freight and Passenger Agent at Watertown. Mr. Wilson bears
the distinction of being the only officer on the property in the North
Country who also was an officer of the old Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh.
He started his service in Watertown as a messenger-boy for the Dominion
Telegraph Company when its office was located in the old Hanford store at
the entrance of the Paddock Arcade. Later he began his railroad service
with the R. W. & O. as operator at Limerick Station. From that time
forward his rise was steady and constant.
* * * * *
I have digressed once again. We left Parsons strengthening a through line
from Suspension Bridge to Portland, Maine, through Northern New York and
across the White Mountains. As an earnest of his interest in this route he
established, almost as soon as he had acquired control of the Rome road,
the once-famous White Mountain Express. In an earlier chapter we have seen
how the local Watertown management of the road had, some years before, set
up a through sleeping-car service in the summers between Watertown and
Fabyan's; using its fine old cars, the _Ontario_ and the _St. Lawrence_
for this service.
The White Mountain Express of the Parsons' regime was a far different
thing from a mere sleeping-car service. It was a genuine through-train,
with Wagner sleeping-cars all the way from Chicago to Portland. It passed
over the rails of the R. W. & O. almost entirely by night; and because of
the high speed set for it over so many miles of congested single-track,
the older engineers refused to run it. The younger men took the gambling
chance with it. And while they expected to run off the miserable track
that Samuel Sloan had left for Parsons, and which could not be rebuilded
in a day or a week or a month or a year, they managed fairly well,
although there were one or two times when the accidents to this train were
serious affairs indeed.
There comes to my mind even now the dim memories of that nasty wreck at
the very beginning of the Parsons' overlordship, when the east-bound White
Mountain, traveling at fifty miles an hour, came a terrible cropper at
Carlyon (now known as Ashwood), thirty miles west of Charlotte. It was on
the evening of the 27th of July, 1883, barely six weeks after Parsons and
Britton had taken the management of the road into their hands. The White
Mountain, in charge of Conductor E. Garrison, had left Niagara Falls, very
heavily laden, and twenty minutes late, at 7:30 p. m., hauled by two of
the road's best locomotives. It consisted of a baggage-car, a day-coach
and nine sleepers; six of these Wagners, and the other three the company's
own cars, the _Ontario_, the _St. Lawrence_ and the _DeKalb_.
A fearful wind blowing off the lake had dislodged a recreant box-car from
the facing-point siding there at Carlyon and had sent it trundling down
toward the oncoming express. In the driving rain the train thrust its nose
right into the clumsy thing. Derailment followed. The leading engine, upon
which Train Despatcher and Assistant Superintendent W. H. Chauncey was
riding, was thrown into the ditch at one side of the track, and the
trailing engine into the ditch at the other. Its engineer and fireman were
killed instantly. The wreckage piled high. It caught fire and it was with
extreme difficulty that the flames were extinguished. In that memorable
calamity seventeen lives were lost and forty persons seriously injured.
Yet out of it came a definite blessing. Up to that time the air-brake had
never been used upon the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh. The Carlyon
accident forced its adoption.
* * * * *
I have no mind to linger on the details of disasters such as this; or of
the one at Forest Lawn a little later when a suburban passenger-train
bound into Rochester was in a fearful rear-end collision with the delayed
west-bound White Mountain and more lives were sacrificed. The Rome road,
as a rule, had a fairly clean record on wrecks, on disastrous ones at any
rate. There was in 1887 a wretched rear-end collision just opposite the
passenger depot at Canton, which cost two or three lives and made
Conductor Omar A. Hine decide that he had had quite enough of active
railroading. And shortly before this there had been a more fortunate, yet
decidedly embarrassing affair down on the old Black River near Glenfield;
the breaking of a side-rod upon a locomotive which killed the engineer and
seriously delayed a distinguished passenger on his way to the Thousand
Islands--Grover Cleveland, then President of the United States, was taking
his bride for a little outing upon the shores of the St. Lawrence River. A
few years later Theodore Roosevelt, in the same post, was to ride up over
that nice picturesque stretch of line. Yet was to see far less of it than
his predecessor had seen. At Utica he had accepted with avidity the
Superintendent's invitation to ride in the engine-cab of his special. He
swung himself quickly up into it. Then reached into his pocket, produced a
small leather-bound book and had a bully time--reading all the way to
Watertown.
One more wreck invites our attention, and then we are done with this
forever grewsome side of railroading: This last a spectacular affair, if
you please, more so even than that dire business back to Carlyon. The
Barnum & Bailey circus was a pretty regular annual visitor to Northern New
York in those days. It began coming in 1873 and for more than a quarter of
a century thereafter it hardly missed a season--generally playing Oswego
(where once the tent blew down, during the afternoon performance, and
there was a genuine panic), Watertown and Ogdensburgh. In this particular
summer week, the show had gone from Watertown to Gouverneur, where it
violated its tradition and abandoned the evening performance in order that
it might promptly entrain for the long haul to Montreal where it was due
to play upon the morrow.
Going down the steep grade at Clark's Crossing, two miles east of Potsdam,
the axle of one of the elephant cars, in one of the sections, broke and
the train piled up behind it--a fearful and a curious mass of wreckage.
Fortunately the sacrifice of human life was not a feature of this
accident. But the loss of animal life was very heavy. Valuable riding
horses, trained beasts and many rare and curious animals were killed. Into
the annals of Northern New York it all went as a wonderful night. In the
glare of great bonfires men and women from many climes and in curious
garb stalked solemnly around and whispered alarmedly in tongues strange
indeed to Potsdam and its vicinage. Giraffes and elephants and sacred cows
found refuge in Mr. Clark's barn. Outside long trenches were dug for the
burial of the wreck victims. John O'Sullivan, for forty years station
agent at Potsdam, and now resting honorably from his labors, says that it
was the worst day that he ever put in.
It was at this wreck that Ben Batchelder, whose name brings many memories
to every old R. W. & O. man, finding that his wrecking equipment was
entirely inadequate for clearing the miniature mountain range of debris
that ran along the track, put the Barnum & Bailey elephants at work
clearing it. Under the charge of their keepers these alien animals pulled
on huge chains and long ropes and slowly cleared the iron. Yet it was not
until late in the afternoon of the following day that the track was fully
restored and usable. By that time the children of Montreal had been robbed
of that which was their right. And Charles Parsons, in New York, was
remarking to his son, that perhaps, a fleet of well-trained elephants
would make a good addition to a wrecking crew.
* * * * *
Once again I have digressed. Yet offer no apologies. Parsons did not let
the wrecks of the White Mountain discourage him in the operation of the
train. On the contrary, he ordered Mr. Britton to proceed with haste to
the complete installation of the air-brake--then still a considerable
novelty--upon every corner of the road. He steadily bettered the bridges
and the track, tore out the old, stub-switches and substituted for them
the newest, split-switches, with signal lights. The White Mountain
remained; all through his day, and many a day thereafter--even though in
the years after Mr. Britton and he were gone from the road, it was to be
operated between Buffalo and Syracuse over the main line of the New York
Central. And, inasmuch as he was steadily increasing his affiliations with
the Ontario & Western, he installed in connection with it and the Wabash,
a through train from Chicago to Weehawken (opposite New York); going over
the rails of the R. W. & O. from Suspension Bridge to Oswego. This train,
running the year round, and also put at a pretty swift schedule, had
little reputation for adhering to it. Upon one occasion a commercial
traveler bound to Charlotte approaching the old station at "the Bridge" to
find out how late "the O. & W." was reported, was astounded when the agent
replied "on time." Such a thing had not been known before that winter, or
for many winters. And the fact that for a week past it had stormed almost
continuously, only compounded the drummer's perplexity.
"How is it--on time?" he stammered.
"This is yesterday's train," was the prompt response. "She's just
twenty-four hours late."
Eventually and in the close campaign for railroad economy that came across
the land a few years ago, this train, too, was sacrificed. For a time the
experiment was tried of sending its through sleeping-car over the main
line of the Central from Suspension Bridge to Syracuse on a through train;
passing it on from the latter town to the Ontario & Western by way of the
old Chenango Valley branch of the West Shore. The experiment lingered for
a time and then expired. It is not likely that it will ever be renewed.
* * * * *
By 1888 Parsons had begun to develop a very real railroad, indeed. The
Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh once again was a power in the land. It had
ninety-one locomotives, ninety-one passenger-cars, forty-eight baggage,
mail and express cars, and 2302 freight-cars, of one type or another.
Parsons, as its President, was assisted by two Vice-Presidents, Clarence
S. Day, and his son, Charles Parsons, Jr. Mr. Lawyer still remained
Secretary and Treasurer of the road, even though his offices had been
moved two years before from Watertown to New York City. At Watertown, the
veteran local agent, R. R. Smiley, remained in charge of affairs, with the
title of Assistant Secretary of the company. And Mr. Britton was, of
course, still its General Manager, at Oswego.
He was really a tremendous man, Hiram M. Britton, in appearance, a big
upstanding citizen, red of beard and clear of eye. I have not, as yet,
given anything like the proper amount of consideration to his dominating
personality. He made a position for himself in North Country railroading
that would fairly entitle him to a whole chapter in a book such as this.
Mr. Britton was born in Concord, Mass., November 22, 1831. At that time
that little town was almost at the height of its high fame as a literary
center. As a boy he claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson as a friend. The influence
that Emerson had upon Britton remained with him all the years of his life.
At seventeen, owing to financial reverses that his father had sustained,
young Britton was compelled to leave school and go to work. He found a job
on the old Fitchburg as fireman; from that he quickly rose to be engineer
and then Master Mechanic. He made his way down into New Jersey and became
Superintendent of the New Jersey and North Eastern Railway; after that
General Manager of the New Jersey Midland, the portion of the old
Oswego Midland to-day embraced by a considerable part of the New York,
Susquehanna & Western.... From that last post, in the summer of 1883 to
the management of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh. That position he
retained until 1890, when increasing ill-health forced him to relinquish
it and travel throughout Europe in a vain effort to regain his strength.
The presidencies, both of the Rome road and of one of the Pennsylvania
System lines were offered him. He was compelled to refuse both. His
strength gradually failed, and in 1893 he died.
[Illustration: HIRAM M. BRITTON The First General Manager of the Rome,
Watertown & Ogdensburgh and a Railroad Genius.]
The old R. W. & O. was compelled in its day and generation to assume some
pretty hard, human handicaps. But Britton was a mighty asset to it. He
loved his work. It was a real and an eternal delight to him to achieve the
things that he had set out to do. He was always approachable, obliging and
ready to meet all reasonable requests that came within his power; he had
the faculty of making friends of those who came in contact with him, and
of retaining their friendship. A man's man was Hiram M. Britton, a
railroad captain of great alertness, and possessed not only of vast
enthusiasm, but also of a wondrous ability for hard work. The hard
problems of his job never feazed him. Even the winter snows--forever its
_bete noire_--did not discourage him, not for long, at any rate. He came,
as came so many men from outside the borders of the North Country, with
something like a contempt for its midwinter storms. Before Britton had
been long on the job, however, the line from Potsdam to Watertown was
completely blocked for four long days, and he learned that it was all in a
day's work when the ticking wires reported two engines and a plow derailed
at Pulaski, two more off at Kasoag, and not a train in or out of Watertown
for more than thirty hours. At all of which he would relight his pipe and
send a few telegrams of real encouragement up and down the line. That is,
he sent the telegrams when the wires remained up above the tops of the
snow-drifts and the men were using them to hang their coats upon as they
shoveled the heavy snow. Ofttimes the wires went down, and once in a while
they were deliberately cut--by some harassed and nerve-racked,
snow-fighting boss.
That was before the days of the famous Dewey episode at Manila, but the
emergency at the moment must have seemed quite as great. At any rate the
Gordian knot, translated into a thin thread of copper wire, was cut--not
once, but frequently. I myself, in later years, have seen a Superintendent
go into our lower yard at Watertown late at night when congestion piled
upon congestion, when the zero wind whistled up through the flats from
down Sackett's Harbor way, and the evening train up the line nestled
somewhere near Massey Street crossing in a hopelessly inert and frozen
fashion, and clean up the mess there. Once one of these inbound trains
from down the line coming down the long grade into the yard crashed into a
snowbound freight there, and split the caboose asunder, as clean a job as
if it had been done with a sharp ax. There were six men asleep in the
caboose--to say nothing of two in the cab of the oncoming train, and yet
no lives were lost. Even though the Watertown Fire Department spent most
of the rest of the night putting out the fearful blaze that arose from the
wreckage. Corn meal was spread bountifully about atop of the snow, and no
one on the flats lacked for pudding the rest of that winter.
* * * * *
Once, in the Britton regime, there had been nearly a week when Watertown
was entirely cut off from Richland and the towns to the South of it. A
show-troupe, marooned at that junction for seven fearful days, had rigged
up a theater in the old depot and there had played _Ten Nights in a
Barroom_, in order to pay its hotel bill. At least so runs the tradition.
The Rome road felt that it owed some obligation to its old, chief town and
all the while it kept steadily at its all but hopeless task, although
every night the fresh wind blowing down from Canada and across the icy
surface of Ontario filled the long miles of railroad cuts and completely
erased the sight of the rails. Parsons had bought plows for the road such
as it had never seen before--huge Russells and giant rotaries that would
cut the snow as with a giant gimlet, and then send it shooting a quarter
of a mile off over the country, so that it would not blow back at once
into the cuttings. There is a good deal of real technique in this
practical science of fighting snow--and a deal of variance as to the
proper technique. For instance, in the Rome road they used to place its
old-fashioned "wing-plows" ahead of its pushing locomotives, while the
Black River line invariably had its plows follow the engine. It claimed
for itself the proof of the pudding, in the fact that whereas in blizzard
weather the Rome road almost invariably was blocked, the Black River line
rarely was. It is but fair to add, however, that the original construction
of the R. W. & O. north of Richland was very bad for snow-fighting; there
were many miles of shallow cuttings into which the prevailing winds off
Lake Ontario could easily pack the soft wet snow. In after years and
under New York Central management this primary defect was corrected. And
the large expense of the track elevation was quite offset by the great
economies in snow-fighting costs that immediately ensued.
Yet try as H. M. Britton might and did try he seemed fated there in the
eighties to buck against the worst storms that the North Country had known
in more than half a century. That same storm that tied up his main line
roundabout Richland--always a snow trouble center--completely paralyzed
the Cape Vincent branch. It came as the grand finale to a sequence of
particularly severe snowfalls and hard blows. The deficit upon the Cape
Vincent branch that winter--I think it was the spring of 1887--rose to an
appalling figure. Finally the R. W. & O. gave up the Cape branch as a
hopeless proposition and hired a liveryman to carry the mails between
Watertown and Cape Vincent, in order that it might not violate its
contract with the Postoffice Department.
After the branch had been abandoned a full fortnight, a delegation of
citizens from the Cape drove to Watertown and there confronted Britton,
who had made an appointment to meet them. They made their little speeches
and they were pretty hot little speeches--hot enough to have melted away
more than one good-sized drift.
"When are you going to cart that snow off our line?" finally demanded the
spokesman of the Cape Vincent folk.
Britton looked at the delegation coolly, and lighted a fresh cigar.
"I am going to let the man that put it there," he said slowly, "take it
away."
And he did. It was thirty-two days before a railroad engine entered Cape
Vincent from the time that the last one had left it.
* * * * *
The days of that final decade of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh were,
most of them, however, good days indeed. Fondly do the men of that era,
getting, alas, fewer each year, speak of the time when the Rome road had
its corporate identity and, what meant far more to them, a corporate
personality. For the R. W. & O. did have in those last days those elusive
qualities, that even the so-called inanimate corporation can sometimes
have--a heart and a soul. Yet, in every case, attributes such as these
must come from above, from the men in real charge of a property. The
courtesy of the ticket-agent, the friendliness of the conductor are the
reflection of the courtesy and the friendliness of the men above him. It
is enough to say that H. M. Britton was at all times both courteous and
friendly. He was a tremendous inspiration to the men with, and below him.
In the doleful days of the Sloan administration the R. W. & O. began to
deteriorate in its morale, with a tremendous rapidity. In the days after
the coming of Parsons and of Britton it began slowly, but very surely, to
regain this quality so precious and so essential to the successful
operation of any railroad. The property began to pick up amazingly. At
first it was, indeed, a heartbreaking task. As we have seen, at the end of
the Sloan regime little but a shell remained of a once proud and
prosperous railroad. The road needed ties and rails, bridges, shops,
power, rolling-stock--everything. More than these even it needed the
future confidence of its employes. It needed men with ideas and men with
vision. From its new owners gradually came all of these things.
Yet, before the things material, came the things spiritual, if you will
let me put it that way. Britton gained the confidence of his men. He
played the game and he played it fairly. And no one knows better when it's
being played fairly by the big bosses at headquarters, than does your
keen-witted railroader of the rank and file. Perhaps, the best testimony
to the bigness of H. M. Britton came not long ago, from one of the men
who had worked under him--a veteran engineer, to-day retired and living at
his home in St. Lawrence County.
"We didn't get much money, I'll grant you," says this man, "but somehow we
didn't seem to need much. And yet, I don't know but what we had as much to
live on as we do now. But that didn't make any difference. We were
interested in the road and we were all helping to put it in the position
that we felt it ought to be in. In those earliest days, you know, our
engines used to have a lot of brasswork. We used to spend hours over them,
keeping them in shape, polishing them and scrubbing them. And when we had
no polishing or scrubbing to do, we'd go down to the yard and just sit in
them. They belonged to us. The company may have paid for them, but we
owned them."
So was it. "Charley" Vogel running the local freight from Watertown to
Norwood, down one day and back the next, in "opposition" to "Than"
Peterson used to boast that he could eat his lunch from the running-board
of his cleanly engine; which had started her career years before as the
_Moses Taylor_, No. 35. Ed. Geer, his fireman, was as hard a worker as the
skipper. This frame of mind was characteristic of all ranks and of all
classes. Indeed, the company may have paid for the road, but the men did
own it. And they owned it in a sense that cannot easily be understood
to-day--in the confusion of national agreements and decisions by the Labor
Board out at Chicago and a vast and pathetic multiplicity of red-tape
between the railroad worker and his boss.
Take Ben Batchelder: We saw him a moment ago with John O'Sullivan working
a thirty-six hour day to clean up a circus wreck just outside of Potsdam.
That was Ben Batchelder's way always. Incidentally, it was just one of his
days. One time, in midwinter, during a fortnight of constant and heavy
snow, when Ben had become Master Mechanic at Watertown, the Despatcher
called him on the 'phone and asked for a locomotive to operate a
snow-plow. Ben replied that all the locomotives were frozen and that it
would be slow work thawing them out, and making them ready for service.
"Then why don't you take them into the house and thaw them out?" shouted
the Despatcher.
"There's no roof on the house, and I'm too busy to-day to put one on," was
the quick retort.
Faith and loyalty--we did not call it morale in those days, but it was,
just the same. Here was Conductor William Schram with a brisk little job,
handling the way freight on the old Cape branch: He had just spent three
days bringing a big Russell plow through from the Cape to Watertown. On
getting into Watertown it was needed to open up the road between that city
and Philadelphia. Schram had been on duty three days without rest. Another
conductor was called to relieve him. William Schram protested. He said
that he did not feel that he could desert the road when it was in a fix.
Three other conductors, well famed in the days of the Parsons' regime of
the Rome road, were Andrew Dixon, Tom Cooper and Daniel Eggleston--and a
fourth was the well-known Jacob Herman, of Watertown. Jake was a warm
personal friend of both Parsons and Britton. Finally, it came to a point
where the President would have no other man in charge of his train when he
made his inspection trips over the property, and he advanced and protected
him in every conceivable way. He insisted even upon Jake accompanying him
back and forth from New York on the occasion of his frequent visits into
the North Country.
In an earlier chapter I referred to the easy traditions of the long-agos
in regard to the passenger receipts from the average American railroad.
The R. W. & O. had been no exception to this general rule. Along about
1888 or 1889 Parsons decided that he would make it an exception
henceforth. He violated the old traditions and sent "spotters" out upon
the passenger trains. As a direct result of their observations some
thirteen or fourteen of the oldest men on the line were dropped from its
service. Not only this, but several months' pay was withheld from the
envelopes of each of them as they were discharged. Just prior to this
volcano-like eruption on the part of "the old man" Parsons sent Herman up
to Watertown as station master--a position which he has continued to hold
until comparatively recent months.
The "stove committees" "joshed" Jake pretty well over his boss's strategy,
knowing full well all the while, that if there was one honest conductor on
the whole line, it was that selfsame Jacob Herman. Not only honest, but
courageous. It was in a slightly earlier era that the road had a good deal
of trouble on the Rome branch with what they called "bark
peelers"--woodsmen, who would come down out of the forest and in their
boisterous fashion make a deal of trouble for the train-crew.
Jake Herman was told off to end that nuisance. It was a regular
honest-to-goodness-carry-the-message-to-Garcia sort of a job. Well, Jake
got the message through to Garcia. He picked out six brakemen as
assistant messengers, any one of whom would have made a real Cornell
center-rush. They were the "flower of the flock."
At Richland the gang boarded the evening train down from Watertown.
Somewhere between that station and Kasoag they detrained--as a military
man might put it. But not in a military fashion. Along the right-of-way
Captain Jake and his lieutenants distributed "bark-peelers," with a fair
degree of regularity of interval. Up to that time it had been no sinecure,
being a conductor or a trainman on the old Rome road. After that it became
as easy as running an infant class in a Sunday School.
John D. Tapley was another well known conductor of those days, and so was
W. S. Hammond, who afterwards became division superintendent at Carthage.
These men were U. & B. R. graduates, and it was but logical that when
Hammond came to his promotion reward, it should be upon the corner of the
property on which he had been schooled and with which he was most
familiar. He was a man of tremendous popularity among his men.
* * * * *
Sometimes these men of the rank and file had their reward. More often they
did not. John O'Sullivan's came when in 1890, after a few years of
unsuccessful experimentation, General Passenger Agent Butterfield handed
him the annual Northern New York Sunday excursion to Ontario Beach (in the
outskirts of Rochester) and asked him what he could do with it. O'Sullivan
replied that he could make it go. He had watched the success of the road's
annual long-distance excursions; to Washington in the spring and to New
York in October--this last for a fixed fare of six dollars, for a six or
seven hundred mile journey. The excursions ran coaches, parlor-cars,
dining-cars and sleeping-cars, and did a land-office business. Northern
New York had acquired a taste for railroad travel. O'Sullivan knew this.
"I'll take you on," said he to Mr. Butterfield.
And so he did. For seventeen successive years thereafter he handled the
annual Ontario Beach excursion from Potsdam and all its adjoining
stations--all the way from Norwood to Watertown--on a one-day trip over
some four hundred miles of single-track railroad. The excursion had a vast
business--invariably running in several sections, each drawn by two
locomotives, and having from fifteen to sixteen cars each. It carried
passengers for $2.50 for the round trip. Few Northern New York folk along
the road went to bed until it returned, which was always well into the wee
small hours of Monday morning. And yet, it was withal, a reasonably
orderly crowd. O'Sullivan kept it so. On the handbills which announced it
each year appeared these conspicuous words:
"Behave yourself. If you can't behave yourself, don't go."
* * * * *
Yet a practical reward such as this could in truth be handed to but a very
few of the road's workers indeed. Yet it continued until the end to
command their loyalty. Not even the cruel handling of the property by the
predecessors of Parsons could dampen that loyalty. To even attempt to make
a list of the hard-working and energetic workers of that day and
generation of the eighties would mean a catalogue far larger than this
little book. There comes to mind a brilliant list--names some of them
to-day still with us, and some of them but affectionate traditions: George
Snell, who began by running the _Doxtater_; Patsy Tobin, who had the old
_Gardner Colby_ on the day that she exploded on Harrison Hill, just
outside of Canton; Ed. McNiff; William Bavis; Butler (who had started his
career toward an engine-cab as blacksmith at DeKalb Junction, trimming for
relaying the old iron rails that the section-gangs brought to him); and
Superintendent W. S. (Billy) Jones.
Jones was a much-loved officer of the old R. W. & O. He started his
railroad career at Sandy Creek, as an operator, receiving his messages
with one of the old-fashioned printing-telegraphs. One day Richard Holden,
of Watertown, dropped into the Sandy Creek depot and suggested to Jones
that he throw the old contraption out of the window--it was forever
getting out of order. Jones demurred for a time; then accepted the
suggestion. And in a few weeks was one of the best operators on the line,
which led presently to his appointment as agent at Ogdensburgh, where he
remained until the days of the Parsons' control.
Both Britton and Parsons were constantly on the alert to discover the best
available material on their property and Jones was appointed in the
mid-eighties to be superintendent of the line east of Watertown, with
headquarters at DeKalb. Later he was moved to Watertown and there became
one of the fixtures of the town.
* * * * *
I cannot close this chapter of the second golden age of the Rome road
without a passing reference to George H. Haselton, who died but a year or
two ago. Mr. Haselton was the successor of Griggs of Jackson and of Close,
becoming Master Mechanic of the road in 1878, or at about the time its
shops were moved from Rome to Oswego. He builded in the latter city the
engines that were the precursors of the mighty power of to-day. He used
great facility in building and rebuilding the early locomotives of the R.
W. & O.--in keeping them in service, seemingly forever and a day. In the
North Country a locomotive goes in for long service and, in its difficult
climate, hard service, too. There still is, or was until very recently at
least, a locomotive in service at the plant of the Hannawa Pulp Company at
Potsdam, which although ordered by the Union Pacific Railroad from the
Taunton Locomotive Works was delivered to the Central Vermont in May,
1869. First named the _St. Albans_ and then the _Shelbourne_, she was
inherited by the Rutland Railroad and then, after many rebuildings turned
over by its Ogdensburgh branch (the former Northern Railroad) to the
Norwood & St. Lawrence Railroad. Fifty years of service through a stern
northland seemed to work little damage to this staunch old settler. She
was typical of her kind--old-fashioned built, and with old-fashioned
standards of the service to be rendered.