USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 17
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97
The Appletons, Samuel and William, the Grays, J. C., F. C., and Horace, G. W. Lyman, John Parker, Jno. Phillips, the Pratts, G. W. and Wil- liam, Wm. Sturgis, John Tappan, T. B. Wales, and several others subscribed for 50 each. Many well-known Boston names are not found at all. A number of the subscriptions, including sonie of the larger ones, suggest grave doubts as to the good faith with which they were made. Noth- ing was paid in on them.
I33
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
ward with a proposition for direct State aid to the railroad. This the friends of the latter eagerly accepted; it passed the House by a vote of two hun- dred and forty-three to nine, was slightly amended in the Senate, and finally received the Governor's signature on April 4, 1836. As soon as the sub- scription bill was deemed safe, the bank bill was indefinitely postponed. A further sum of one million dollars was thus secured.
Before work could be begun it was necessary to have ten per cent paid in on the stock. This first assessment, even, the treasurer found great difficulty in collecting. The country was poor, and the war on the banks had led to a violent contraction of the currency. The financial crisis of 1837 was impending. While, therefore, the great majority of those who had subscribed for stock responded readily enough, there were some who had failed, some who had moved away, some who declared that when they sub- scribed they had done so with the understanding that upon paying five per cent they might relinquish their shares, and still others who simply refused to respond at all. It so happened, however, that Harrison Gray Otis, David Sears, and certain other wealthy Bostonians had refused to subscribe, ap- parently not being willing to bind themselves to payment in full for such amounts of stock as they would have been expected to take; but in doing so they had agreed to give outright to the enterprise sums amounting in the aggregate to several thousand dollars. This money was now applied by the treasurer to the payment of the assessment on the defaulted stock, which new parties were then induced to subscribe for at a discount of ten per cent. The treasurer was thus enabled to report that the requisite amount had been paid in on every share; and early in 1837 the work of grading was at last begun.
The subsequent financial history of the Western road makes no part of the present work, except in so far as it relates to Boston and its citizens. As has been seen, however, the enterprise was essentially a Boston enterprise, for citizens of Boston constituted numerically more than half of its original body of stockholders; and then, and ever since, they have held more than two-thirds of its stock. The president and the treasurer of the corporation were both citizens of Boston, and in Boston the burden of construction all through the dreary years which succeeded the crisis of 1837 made itself most heavily felt. The stock was widely distributed among those in active business; and no day then passed without its record of business failures. The banks suspended specie payments. Private credit had received a severe shock; and matters presently became so bad, that when, in 1838, an issue of the State scrip, made in further aid of the enterprise, was sent to Lon- don for sale, the bonds were after a time returned by the house of Baring Bros. & Co., on the ground that "owing to the repudiation of Pennsylvania, there was no sale of American stocks at any price." The construction of the road by unaided private enterprise would, therefore, at the time and under the circumstances have been simply impossible. Had not the State lent its aid, work must have been suspended and bankruptcy would have
I 34
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
ensued. In the full light of subsequent experience, however, it admits of question whether this would not have been better for Boston, and better for the State. The completion of the Western road, at the time and in the way it was completed, proved in the end far from an unmixed public benefit. Had a failure and temporary suspension of the work taken place in 1837, a reorganization would soon have been effected, and the line would have been built through a few years at farthest later than it was. Possibly, too, it might have been built by sections, and as an extension of the Boston & Worcester, under one ownership and management with it. Private enter- prise would have proved easily equal to the whole undertaking.
As it was, the apparent success of this experiment of State aid became at a later day a precedent and an argument. As such it led to other and far larger, while much less judicious, experiments of the same kind. As will presently be seen, also, the premature construction of the Western road, not as an extension of the Boston & Worcester, but independent of it and in some degree antagonistic to it, was productive of other results now ap- parent enough, but which then could not be foreseen. Palsied by State aid, the Western road never got firmly rooted in the private enterprise and capital of Boston. For years it remained in the air, as it were. It was separated from its natural base; and this fact very sensibly affected the course of subsequent events. The railroad to Albany should in the devel- opment of those events have been to Boston what the Pennsylvania was to Philadelphia, and the Baltimore & Ohio was to Baltimore, - the nucleus about which the ability, enterprise, and capital of the city crystallized, until it enlarged and strengthened into the basis of what was to prove an ex- pansive external development. This did not take place. Instead of it the two segments of what should have been a single property wasted twenty years in bickering over the division of a joint business; while the private wealth and individual enterprise of Boston sought and found their field in a system of railroads which made Chicago its base. The railroad map of the United States might well, therefore, so far as Boston is concerned, have been far different from what it ultimately became, had the State in 1837 held fast to its principles, and forced private enterprise to work out its destiny in obedience to business laws, unincumbered by legislative aid.
At the time, however, nothing of all this could have been foreseen; and it was natural enough for the promoters of what was really a great public undertaking to look to the State in their extreme need. They did not look in vain. In 1838 they obtained from the Legislature another measure of re- lief; in 1839 yet another; and still a fourth in 1840. The road, estimated to cost three millions, required about seven millions to complete it, -of which five millions were supplied from the public purse. The final assessment of forty per cent on the private stock was not called in until after the line had been opened through to Albany, in January, 1842. The Western Railroad was the most considerable enterprise of its kind which had then been un-
I35
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
dertaken in America; and, taking all the circumstances of time, novelty, and financial disturbance into account, it may well be questioned whether anything equal to it has been accomplished since. It does not of course need to be said that, as compared with many of those enterprises since hurried to completion across the Plains or amid the Rocky Mountains, the one hundred and fifty-five miles of track painfully built through the Berk- shire Hills between 1837 and 1842, at an average rate of twenty miles a year, was a very small affair. It was, however, a pioneer. It showed what could be done, and how the locomotive could climb. The voyage of Co- lumbus, though made in a very small vessel, has lost none of its interest because much bigger vessels are now built, and crossing the Atlantic has become an every-day affair; neither will Fremont's passage of the Rockys ever cease to be a memorable event, notwithstanding the fact that trains may run as regularly between Chicago and San Francisco as they do be- tween Boston and New York ..
Of all those connected with the building of the Western road, George Bliss, of Springfield, was the one upon whom the heaviest burden of the work devolved.1 He, however, was never identified with Boston. Of the Bostonians connected with it, three - Thomas B. Wales, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and P. P. F. Degrand - deserve especial mention. Mr. Wales is identified rather with the Providence than with the Western road, though he was president of the latter from the first organization of the company until the locomotive was running to Albany. In February, 1842, he declined a re- election. Mr. Wales was one of that school of Boston merchants common enough in the first half of the century, but which gradually passed away with the advent of steam. He was born in Randolph, Mass., on the first day of the year 1776, and graduated at Harvard College in the class of 1795. The active portion of his business life was passed in his counting-room on the wharf in Boston which bore his name, and from which he traded with various European ports, more especially those of France. Noted for in- tegrity and methodical business ways, he had already, when the railroad era dawned, retired from active mercantile life with what was in those days looked upon as an ample fortune. Under these circumstances, and as his name was respected wherever it was known, younger men in organizing the railroad schemes naturally turned to him as one whose known connection with those schemes would give them character. He responded freely, and accepted the presidency of the Western road from motives of the purest public spirit, at a time when the outlook for the enterprise was far from encouraging.
Mr. Degrand was, as his name indicates, of French descent, and himself an immigrant. In accent, in appearance, and in manners he remained indeed to the end of his life a French gentleman of that formal school which sur-
1 [He printed an Historical Memoir of the the marshes, with the city beyond, and showing Western Railroad in 1863. A view of the cross- ing of the Worcester and Providence roads on
the style of cars used about 1840, is given in Barber's Hist. Coll. of Mass .- ED.].
I36
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
vived the Revolution only in the provinces. In active business as a broker in Boston, he was an enthusiast on the subject of railroads; and, though not himself a man of large means, most forward in promoting them. A general favorite among men of business, and much respected for his integ- rity of character, he was a good deal ridiculed for the extravagance of his predictions, all of which have, however, since been more than realized. He
Cipriano del,
THOMAS B. WALES.1
was wont, among other things, energetically to refer to the Worcester road as a forty-four mile extension of Boston Long-Wharf. He was the author of the address to the people of the State issued by the stockholders of the Western Railroad Corporation in January, 1841, which resulted in the third grant of aid. He was, however, not always so fortunate in his methods of appeal; and he created a good deal of amusement by one of them, which was suggested to him by a sermon the Rev. S. K. Lothrop
1 [This cut follows an original likeness painted in 1843 by George P. Healey, and now in the possession of George W. Wales, Esq., a son .- ED.]
I37
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
had delivered in the Church in Brattle Street, on the subject of the moral and Christianizing influence of railroads. This discourse attracted at the time a good deal of attention; and Mr. Degrand, seizing the opportunity, forthwith got up a circular on his own account, a copy of which he sent to every clergyman in Massachusetts. In it he suggested the propriety of dis-
JOSIAH QUINCY, JR.1
courses on the moral and Christianizing influence of railroads in general, - and of the Western Railroad in particular. He died in the year 1855.
Josiah Quincy, Jr., was at a subsequent period too closely connected with the municipal history of Boston to call for any detailed mention of him here. At the time of his election as treasurer of the Western Railroad Cor- poration, in January, 1836, he was thirty-four years of age, and a lawyer by profession. Abandoning that calling in view of the engrossing nature of
1 [This cut follows a likeness hanging in the Railroad Station. Mr. Quincy was also painted by Page, about 1845 .- ED.]
president's room of the Boston & Providence VOL. IV. - 18.
138
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
the new duties imposed upon him, he devoted himself wholly to the care of the company's finances. He resigned in February, 1848, after twelve years of arduous service, to the value of which the stockholders of the company bore testimony in a vote of earnest thanks entered upon their records. During the period of construction, the whole management of the finances of the company was devolved on Mr. Quincy. Strange as it seems, there was even no standing committee, of the directors, on finance. His sanguine temperament then enabled Mr. Quincy to meet difficulties in the presence of which a more cautious man would have stopped; and, throughout the long financial depression from 1837 to 1843, he always succeeded in some- how or somewhere borrowing money enough to keep the work of construc- tion going on. At one time he got it from the banks and the institutions of savings ; at another from the firm of Baring Bros. & Co .; and then, as a last resort, he squeezed it out of the embarrassed stockholders. He just succeeded in weathering the storm. He did weather it, however ; and when, after seeing the stock of the company selling at $40 a share in 1843, he five years later resigned, the same stock had for three years stood at a pre- mium, dividends were paid upon it regularly, and the debt of the company was being fast paid off.
The Western Railroad 1 was opened through its entire length during the last days of the year 1841, and the event was celebrated in the usual way. On the 27th of December the Boston City Government went to Albany, where they were duly entertained; and on their return they brought with them their hosts, who partook of a municipal dinner on the
I The consolidation of the Boston & Worces- ter and the Western Railroad Companies took place in January, 1868, under an Act incorpor- ating the Boston & Albany Railroad Company, passed by the Legislature of the previous year. The barrier in the way of the commercial devel- opment of Boston, occasioned by inability of the two original companies to act in harmony, had gradually given rise to a feeling of deep-seated popular discontent. A movement looking to the purchase of both roads by the State, under its reserved rights, had been started in the autumn of 1866 by Mr. Josiah Quincy. His scheme looked to a public management; and the utter absence of ocean steamship facilities at the port, which a year later led to the entire withdrawal from it of the Cunard line of steamers, caused the suggestion to be much discussed. The result was the consolidation of the two companies un- der a single management. Prior to this event it is a curious fact that the direct through line from Boston to the West had practically no means of receiving or delivering ocean freights at tidewater.
In 1869, as the result of a long and costly litigation, the Boston & Albany company suc- ceeded in getting control of the Grand Junction
road, by means of which it reached the docks at East Boston. During the same year it effected an arrangement with its western railroad connec- tions by which produce could be shipped through to Europe by way of Boston, at the New York rate. The revival of Boston as an ocean steam- ship port dates from this time, and was very rapid. In 1867 no steamers sailed regularly from Boston to any foreign port. During the year 1880 no less than 333 steamers cleared from it. The exports by way of Boston had increased proportionately, - that of wheat-flour, for ill- stance, from 177,000 barrels to 3,678,000; that of cheese, from 40,000 pounds to 4,335,000; that of lard, from 767,000 pounds to 48,000,000; while of live animals, 95,755 were exported in 1880, while none had been exported in 1870.
The management of the consolidated line was financially most successful. Its gross earn- ings rose from $6,000,000 in 1868, to $9,800,000 in 1873. Under the influence of the depression which followed the crisis of that year, they then fell away to $6,400,000 in 1879; but in 1880 they began to rise again, and amounted to $7,740,000.
The market value of its stock ranged from $160 per share shortly after the consolidation, to $112 in 1877, and $175 in 1881.
I39
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
evening of December 30. These two occasions were enlivened by the usual interchange of sentiments and speeches, which now seem dull and prosaic enough. The novelty of railroad construction had already passed away.1
From the date of the completion of the Western road, the history of local railroad development, so far as Boston is concerned, becomes a mere record of dates and statistics. An article in the Monthly Chronicle, for June, 1841, begins with these words: "The magnificent system of railroads, extending from a common centre at Boston, throughout the State of Massachusetts, and reaching to four of the adjoining States, is now nearly completed." The "magnificent system" thus referred to included three hundred and thirty-seven miles of road, which had cost about $14,000,000, and earned . in 1839 $1,000,000 in gross. The Eastern was a part of this system, as well as the three initial Boston lines. This road was a Salem enterprise. It originated with Mr. William H. Foster, a citizen of that place, and then, and down to the year 1881, cashier of the Asiatic Bank there. It was char- tered in April, 1836. George Peabody, a Salem merchant and a relative of the more famous London banker of the same name, was the first president of the company, and in 1840 was succeeded by Captain David A. Neal, also of Salem. A few years later Captain Neal became very prominent among the earlier railroad magnates, being closely identified with both the Reading road, of Pennsylvania, and the Illinois Central. It was not until 1854, however, that the Eastern reached a station on Causeway Street, in the city proper. Prior to that year its southern terminus was at the wharf in East Boston, from which it made a ferry connection.
Chartered in March, 1833, as a branch of the Lowell road, and under the name of the Andover & Wilmington Railroad Corporation, the Boston & Maine did not reach its final terminus in Haymarket Square until 1845. It had originally received the name it has since borne from an act of the Legislature of New Hampshire, passed in June, 1835; and the Boston & Maine Railroad Company of Massachusetts was not created until March, 1841, when portions of the line had already been for nearly five years in operation. When it took its place as one of the Boston terminal roads on the first of July, 1845, it had become, consequently, a comparatively well .
1 There was, however, in these two entertain- ments one episode, - the last of the sort in Mas- sachusetts, - which fairly marked the close of the first era in railroad construction; an incident which showed that railroads had not yet become wholly commonplace affairs. Among the guests who went to Albany with the Boston City Gov- ernment was a party of gentlemen from New Bedford. The incident referred to was as fol- lows : -
"In order to lend point to the astonishing fact that, leaving their homes in the morning, they would in fifteen hours be in Albany, these gentlemen, during the small hours of the day of their departure, caused some spermaceti candles to be moulded, which they took with them on
their trip; and that evening the rays from those candles illumined the table around which took place the civic banquet at Albany. But the Al- banians were not to be outdone. They were to return to Boston with their guests the next day ; and in doing so they took with them a barrel of flour, the wheat for which had been threshed at Rochester on the previous Monday ; they went to Boston on Wednesday, while the barrel itself was made from wood which on the threshing- day had been growing in the tree. This flour, duly converted into bread, the authorities of the two cities, and their invited guests, solemnly ate at a great dinner given at the United States Hotel in Boston, on the evening of Dec. 30, 1841."
140
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
developed enterprise, controlling seventy-four miles of track in operation, earning annually $350,000, and represented by a capital of $2,380,300.
The Fitchburg road was likewise opened through to its western terminus during the year 1845. This line, more probably than any other of those centring in Boston, owed its early construction to one man,-its first presi- dent, Alvah Crocker, of Fitchburg. Mr. Crocker was the very embodiment of Yankee activity and energy. His body was rarely quiet; and it may safely be said that his mind and his tongue never were. An active friend of the Western in the Legislature of 1836, he conceived the idea of a similar railroad to his own town, then a place of about two thousand five hun- dred inhabitants. When he went home after the adjournment he began at once in his peculiar fashion to agitate the matter. The line proposed followed the canal route surveyed by Colonel Baldwin in 1825, and ran through a wild and sparsely settled region, where the idea of building a railroad seemed at the time little less than preposterous. Mr. Crocker, however, was not a man to be turned aside from his project; and at last, in March, 1842, he secured his charter. On Dec. 20, 1843, the road was opened to Waltham; and March 5, 1845, the first locomotive ran into Fitchburg, with Mr. Crocker upon it.
In the autumn of the same year in which the Boston & Maine, and the Fitchburg entered Boston on the north side, the Old Colony entered it on the south. This road, chartered in March, 1844, was opened through to Ply- mouth, Nov. 10, 1845. It at first terminated in the Lincoln Street station of the Boston & Worcester. This arrangement, however, was but temporary ; and in June, 1847, the Kneeland Street station was opened.1
1 The Old Colony, more than any other of the corporations owning roads terminating in Boston, has throughout its history pursued a policy of development and acquisition. Why this should have been so in the case of this corporation, and not so in the case of the others, it would not be easy to explain. The fact, however, remains. Originally chartered in March, 1844, as the Old Colony Railroad Corporation, with a capital of $1,000,000, to build a road from Boston to Ply- mouth, in 1854 it became, through a consolida- tion, the Old Colony & Fall River Railroad Company. In 1862, by another consolidation, it became the Old . Colony & Newport Railway Company ; and at last, in 1872, by a third con- solidation, it became the Old Colony Railway Company. The original road to Plymouth was 37 miles in length. By extension, consolidation, and leases, the Old Colony system has expanded, until, in 1880, it included 475 miles of road, - a larger amount than was then owned or operated by any other Massachusetts corporation. It held, in fact, undivided control of the south- eastern portion of the State.
The principle of growth developed through- out the history of this corporation has not been due to the influence of any one man. The enter-
prise was projected at a later period, when the idea of risk had ceased to be connected with railroad subscriptions. The stock, especially of some of the lines like the Cape Cod, brought into the consolidation at more recent dates, was quite widely distributed, and the management of the road has been a somewhat shifting one. The policy pursued has, however, always been the same, and in striking and happy contrast to the policy pursued by the corporations the roads of which terminated on the north side of the city. The contrast furnishes, indeed, a most suggestive illustration to both the owners of railroads and the communities served by them, of the advanta- ges and disadvantages of competing and consol- idated lines.
Nathan Carruth, of Dorchester, was the first president of the Old Colony; and Willianı Thomas, Jacob H. Loud, Uriel Crocker, and Josiah Quincy, Jr., were members of the earlier boards of direction. Mr. Carruth was succeeded as president by E. Hasket Derby, in 1848. The original one million of capital of the company has been increased from time to time through consolidation and otherwise, until in 1880 it amounted to over seven millions, with more than five millions of funded debt.
I4I
THE CANAL AND RAILROAD ENTERPRISE OF BOSTON.
New-Year's day, 1846, thus found seven distinct Boston terminal lines, and the number did not further increase for ten years. In 1855 what is now the New York & New England, then known as the Boston & New York Central, the successor of the Midland and the predecessor of the Boston, Hartford, & Erie, found its way, through a slough of bankruptcy, to a ter- minus in the city on Broad Street. . It was opened to Putnam, in Connecti- cut, in January, 1855. It is a fact worthy of notice that this alone, of all the Boston terminal roads, reached at last, in 1879, what might be called a con- dition of fair prosperity only as the result of a series of failures and reorgan- izations stretching through a period of more than twenty-five years.1 As business enterprises, all the others were at the outset successful.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.