Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  In a chapter called “The Great Sea Masts of Pine Valley,” Bristow describes the county’s white pine forests, whose tallest trees were prized by shipbuilders for the masts of sailing vessels. These had been too tall to transport by floating them down the local creeks, but the advent of railroads created new lumber business opportunities. He also recounts the building of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway, which had been formed by the merger of three earlier broad-gauge railroads in 1865. Running through the northwestern corner of Warren County on its route from Ohio to Jamestown, New York, the railroad’s trains stopped in the Warren County towns of Columbus Station and Bear Lake in white pine country. The Atlantic and Great Western was later leased and then purchased by the Erie.

  Towering masts of pine, cut in the virgin forests of Warren County, have held the bellying sails which bore the largest sailing vessels across the sea and into every port in the world. Even the New England forests with their great trees and easy accessibility from the sea could not compete with Warren County in furnishing great ship’s masts of beautiful white pine, which were tall and straight and strong. So it happened, when news of the marvelous pines of Western Pennsylvania reached the ship builders at Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and the newly built Atlantic and Great Western Railway offered a means of transporting giant sticks to tide water, the shipyards sent men to Warren County to cut and hew and load the finest masts to be found anywhere….

  Through the midst of this lovely land, the Atlantic and Great Western Railway came building. Swarms of laborers with wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, making a grade and laying down cross ties, spiking down light iron rails, six feet apart. When the iron horse made his first puffing trip over the new rails, he found the evergreen forests of Pine Valley still standing, with only a little of the land cleared for the log cabins and a small settlement. The first short freight trains with ten to twenty small box cars, and the early wooden passenger coaches, lighted with lard oil lamps, came rolling through Pine Valley, the screech of the little locomotive echoing where only the cry of the panther rang before, or the mild toot of some small sawmill engine….

  A large portion of Warren County’s matchless trees had already gone to market when the wide funneled, wood-burning locomotives of the Atlantic and Great Western came puffing through picturesque Pine Valley, leaving a trail of blue smoke loitering in the pines. The very size of the great trees had saved them, they were too big to be floated down Coffee Creek without a great deal of trouble, there were plenty of smaller pines that could be handled more easily. But here was the railroad cutting fairly through the forest, leading away to seaports where great sailing ships were building. The fate of the great pine trees was sealed, they were destined to leave their quiet, sequestered valley, where they had been centuries growing, to be cut down, but not to be cut in pieces like other trees. The great pines were destined to fall and to rise again, to stand upright once more, and now with butt firm rooted in a sea-step in the bottom of some great vessel, to rise high above the decks, holding aloft forests of white sails, instead of waving green boughs, wide pulling sails, which would catch and hold the wind, making it push the ship wheresoever its steersman willed….

  It took three flat cars to carry away the big masts of Pine Valley to the sea. The flat cars on the Atlantic and Great Western were then only thirty feet long, so it took three of them, with the couplings lengthened out with chains and poles, to hold one of the larger masts. And getting the big timbers to the cars was a job. The butt end was gotten onto a set of heavy wheels, the top was allowed to drag. Sometimes it took six span of oxen to haul one of these timbers, once it took nine span, eighteen oxen all straining at their bows and the big whips cracking like rifles over their backs, and even then, once upon a time, there was a giant mast that stuck fast, and thereby hangs a tale.

  Albert Curtis of Columbus tells the story, he was a barefoot boy then, at the time it happened. A crew of men with horses, were moving a mast to the railway cars. At one point they had to cross the track. It was one of those raised crossings, road sloping up to it, and down on the other side. They got that big timber just about half way over the tracks and there it stuck, hard and fast, balanced on the rails.

  A train whistled, it was a freight, coming down grade. They tried to signal the engineer in time. But there was no time. The man at the throttle saw the predicament, sized up the situation at a glance. There were no air-brakes in those days, the brakemen had to run out over the cars and set each brake separately. No time for climbing over cars and setting brakes now, it was a matter of seconds.

  The engineer knew he couldn’t slow his train in time. So he opened the throttle and came thundering down the track with every ounce of steam he had. He hit the log with a splintering crash, smashed through it. The engine and cars stayed on the track a little way, ran on a couple of hundred feet and careened into the ditch. He had cut the mast in two, but it had broken the pony wheels and trucks.

  Local Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society

  This region is home to a single chapter of the National Railway Historical Society known as the Bucktail Chapter, which is affiliated with the Bucksgahuda and Western Railroad of St. Mary’s in Elk County. The chapter operates a nonprofit educational corporation in St. Mary’s, where members preserve and operate industrial railroad equipment. The railroad got its start in 1966, when members purchased a steam locomotive from Germany. They gradually laid track, built facilities, and acquired cars and additional locomotives, including a Shay-type steam locomotive, popular with logging railroads. Every year, members hold a Railroaders’ Day to celebrate that year’s accomplishments. The Bucksgahuda and Western Railroad is located just south of the town on Route 255.

  The Region’s Railroad Giants

  Gen. Thomas L. Kane (1822–83)

  Thomas L. Kane was born into a railroad family. His middle name was Leiper, the surname of his grandfather, the Philadelphian who could claim to have constructed one of the earliest railroads—if not the earliest—in America. Thomas’s father, however, was a district court judge who instructed him in law and awarded him a clerkship. Outside the Commonwealth, Kane is remembered primarily in Salt Lake City. A personal friend of Brigham Young’s, he befriended the Mormons, encouraged their expansion in the West, and worked to make them more widely understood and accepted in America. A travel account written by Kane’s wife, Elizabeth, remains a widely consulted work on early Mormon life.

  In his role as an organizer and agent of the McKean and Elk Land and Improvement Company, Kane explored and studied much of McKean and Elk Counties, finally deciding in 1859 to take up residence; the town was named Kane in his honor. During the Civil War, Kane organized a volunteer regiment consisting of Pennsylvania backwoodsmen from this developing portion of the Commonwealth. Known as the Bucktails, they were distinguished by the deer tails that they wore in their caps.

  As a member of the board of trustees of the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, Kane was one of the men who made certain that this promising venture would pass through McKean County and the town of Kane, a move criticized by railroad historians as the reason why this railroad proved less successful than it might have been. As early as 1890, M. A. Leeson mentioned in a history of Elk County, “The location of the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad, as at present constructed, has been questioned by a number of engineers.”

  Kane was also an organizer of the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad & Coal Company, which served the town of Bradford. When coalfields were discovered in southern Elk and northern Jefferson Counties, Kane worked with the railroad’s engineering department on various options for extending the line to that part of Pennsylvania. He promoted the daring concept of a bridge across the valley of the Kinzua Creek, even though such a structure would be longer and higher than any other railroad viaduct in the world. Many authors writing about the history of the Kinzua Viaduct speculate that Kane personally financed this structure. In a lengthy account of the bridge’s constructio
n published in the Titusville Herald in 1987, however, the Rev. W. George Thornton disagrees, saying, “It is highly likely that the financing of the structure was a corporate and not a personal venture.”

  Kane died in Philadelphia in 1883 and was buried near the Kane Memorial Chapel in McKean County.

  Erastus Corning (1794–1872)

  Erastus Corning began his career in his uncle’s hardware store. In 1826, he started manufacturing nails, a business he later expanded into the Albany Iron Works, which manufactured railroad spikes and imported iron rails from England for sale to the New York Central Railroad. In 1835, he organized the Corning Land Company, which purchased two thousand acres along the Chemung River in New York. The chief asset of this piece of real estate was the Chemung Canal, designed to link the southern counties of New York with the Erie Canal. Corning joined forces with other businessmen to build the New York portion of what would become the Tioga Railroad, which opened for business in 1840, connecting this area with the coalfields of Blossburg, Pennsylvania. Ironically, the town named to honor Corning is better known today as the home of Corning Inc., originally a glass manufacturer that moved to the village in 1868 and had no connection with Erastus Corning.

  In the early 1850s, New York had a number of small railroads serving and linking the cities whose growth had been fostered by the Erie Canal. Erastus Corning, who had been president of the Utica & Schenectady Railroad since 1833, urged that a meeting be held in Albany, where he made a motion that these smaller lines be consolidated into a single rail system. He became the chief promoter for the New York Central Consolidation Act, passed in 1853, and the first president of the New York Central Railroad, from which position he resigned in 1864. Since Corning had also invested in land in Michigan, he had been one of the buyers of the previously state-owned Michigan Central Railroad, which gave the New York Central through service to Chicago and later became an important component of the NYC system.

  In 1867, Corning was more or less ousted from any management role with the New York Central Railroad when Cornelius Vanderbilt voted the huge amount of stock he had acquired and installed a board of his own choosing. In her biography of Corning, Irene D. Neu sums up his career: “Although Corning used his connection with the Central to promote his mercantile, banking, and manufacturing activities, the scope of those activities reflected benefit on the railroad. He failed to secure for the Central a rail line to New York City, but fifteen years before Vanderbilt took over, Corning had provided his road with western connections that gave it access to Chicago. In every important sense he was the architect of the New York Central.”

  Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877)

  “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.” These few words of a very brief 1853 letter are cited by virtually every biographer as evidence of the ruthless character of Cornelius Vanderbilt, remembered primarily as a steamship magnate and nicknamed “the Commodore.”

  Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island and could boast of little formal education. At the age of sixteen, he acquired a small sailboat and began ferrying passengers between Staten Island and New York City. In 1818, he took a job as a steamboat captain, gaining the expertise that he used to create a steamship route through Central America to take adventurers to California during the gold rush.

  In the 1850s, he began acquiring stock in the New York & Harlem Railroad, which ran up the east bank of the Hudson River from New York City toward Albany. He next sought control of this railroad’s chief competitor, the Hudson River Railroad. Through stock purchases, he gained control of the New York Central Railroad and then consolidated it with the Hudson River Railroad in 1869. He leased the New York & Harlem Railroad to this new entity in 1872. President of the New York Central since 1867, Vanderbilt ran the line very efficiently, gaining for it the reputation as one of America’s leading rail systems.

  Cornelius Vanderbilt. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Perhaps to keep this railroad empire from breaking up after his death, he willed most of his vast estate to only one of his children, William Henry Vanderbilt.

  William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–85)

  Cornelius Vanderbilt was disappointed with William’s marriage at the early age of nineteen and was convinced that his son was not destined for success in the business world. Therefore, Cornelius exiled William to a quiet farm on Staten Island. William finally gained his father’s respect when he successfully reorganized the Staten Island Railroad, a thirteen-mile line that had fallen into receivership through poor management.

  Having thus proven himself as a railroad executive on a smaller scale, William Henry Vanderbilt became his father’s chief lieutenant. It was William who insisted that his father buy control of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway and the Michigan Central Railroad. It was also William who was chosen president of the New York Central on his father’s death, a position he held until his resignation due to poor health in 1883.

  On a December day in 1885, while William was meeting with Robert Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, he suddenly slumped forward onto the floor. In five minutes, he was dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Although William’s name is not as widely known today as that of his father, there can be no doubt that he was a very capable railroad manager. His inheritance of approximately $90 million had grown to a personal fortune of $200 million by the time of his death.

  William Henry Vanderbilt. NATIONAL CYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY

  Sampling the Region’s Railroad Scene

  Williamsport

  The town of Williamsport was laid out in 1795, but by 1830, it could boast of only ten brick buildings. So tiny and backward was this woodland hamlet that its designation as county seat aroused bitterness in surrounding communities. Conditions did not begin to improve until after 1833, when Pennsylvania’s State Works linked it by canal to other communities on the Susquehanna River.

  There had been sawmills in the vicinity of Williamsport since the late eighteenth century, but the canal greatly bolstered the local lumbering industry, because it meant that lumber could be more easily shipped from those mills to market. In 1851, the Susquehanna Boom Company constructed Williamsport’s most famous feature, a log boom in the Susquehanna River that acted as a floating parking lot where logs could be captured and sorted for their designated mills. Despite occasional damage from floods, the seven-mile boom transformed Williamsport into America’s late-nineteenth-century lumber capital.

  As early as 1832, Williamsport’s citizens proposed a railroad that would link the town with Elmira, New York. Such a railroad would effectively place the Pennsylvania State Works canal in communication with the Chemung Canal, which was connected to the famous Erie Canal. Philadelphia businessmen might have liked this idea because it had the potential of tapping the trade of western New York, but the locals looked at the proposal as a way to make money on the area’s deposits of bituminous coal. An article appearing in the January 1832 issue of Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania states, “Indeed, it is now known to be a profitable trade to haul, in the winter season on sleds, our Bituminous coal to that state [New York], and bring a return load of Plaster. Again, every blacksmith’s shop will furnish a continued consumption for our coal; and thus steadily promote the interests of the stockholder in this road.”

  Incorporated in 1832, the Williamsport & Elmira RailRoad became part of the Northern Central Railway and subsequently the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsy also absorbed the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, which ran through Williamsport as well. In addition, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad served Williamsport by means of a branch line, making it a very well-connected town.

  Williamsport’s most famous businessman was Peter Herdic, a native of New York who came here in 1853. Besides the lumber industry, Herdic got involved in virtually every other Williamsport business and even served as mayor. He persuaded the Pennsylvania Railroad to relocate its st
ation somewhat west of Williamsport’s main business district, but conveniently adjacent to a luxury hotel he built in 1864. Herdic then sold building lots in this area, where successful businessmen proceeded to build gracious homes.

  The area came to be called “Millionaires’ Row,” which sounded like sarcasm ten years ago when we visited to research the first edition of this book. Back then, many of the Victorian mansions sadly had been subdivided into apartments. Today, however, thanks to the infusion of cash from the shale gas industry, the area looks prosperous again. The façades are restored and the yards landscaped. “Yes, it’s good to see people fixing up their houses,” said the clerk at the gift shop at the Lycoming County Historical Society when we remarked on this development.

  The historical society on West Fourth Street is the best place to sample the lumber and railroad heritage of Williamsport. The society’s two-story museum, named after railroad historian and major donor Thomas T. Taber III, has period rooms and exhibits illustrating major aspects of the area’s history and industries. Much of the museum’s lower level is devoted to the LaRue Shempp Model Train Exhibition, a collection of more than three hundred toy trains that was once housed in LaRue Shempp’s basement. A Williamsport native, Shempp was employed by the Lycoming County Board of Assistance, but his lifelong passion was collecting toy trains; in fact, he was a charter member of both the Train Collectors Association and the Toy Train Operating Society. Shempp did most of his collecting during the 1940s and 1950s and managed to gather many one-of-a-kind prototype and demonstration models. To prevent his collection from being dispersed by auction after his death, he made arrangements to have it housed in the county museum. Though there are only two operating layouts, the rare and unique toy trains can be studied in well-lit cases donated by local businesses. The exhibition now includes a computer running the Microsoft Railroad Simulation software, which gives users an engineer’s eye view of what it’s like to run a train.