USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 14
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The canal fleet was adequately large. The Lady Carrington was soon followed, in the same year, by the John Brown, Rhode Island, Worcester, Providence, Mendon, Massachusetts and John Capron, and from time to time others were added. Their average capacity of freight is said to have been about thirty tons.
Here are typical items of "ship news" which appeared in the Worcester newspapers of the day:
Departed-Canal-boat Providence, Captain Dobson, with 10,000 lbs. lead pipe from T. & J. Sutton, machinery from William Hovey, and iron castings from Sumner Smith.
Departed-boat Massachusetts for Providence with 26 casks of beer and II hogsheads from Trumbull & Ward.
Arrived-Canal-boat Worcester, Captain Green from Providence, with 3457 lbs. of iron for Washburn & Goddard, 4169 lbs. of lead to J. & T. Sutton, 13 bales of cotton, 3 tons of logwood and one ton of copperas for William Buffum, Jr.
The proprietors of the canal did not approve of speeding. One of the rules limited the velocity of a canal boat to four miles an hour, the purpose
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being to discourage racing. Another rule restricted the hours of navigation from one hour before sunrise to one hour after sunset. Even at that slow rate of progress and with restrictions against night travel the boats made the trip between Worcester and Providence in two days. Little time was wasted in the locks, for it took but a few minutes to make the passage. Sometimes a boat negotiated the long line of nine locks in Millbury in one hour.
The fare was cheap-one dollar between the terminal towns, and pro- portionately for lesser distances. The packet boats were comfortable for an overnight passage, it is recorded. Or the travelers might go ashore and patronize an inn. But the number of passengers was never large. The cry of "Low Bridge!" was heard as the landlubber was warned of approaching danger to his head.
But the canal was very seriously felt by the overland freight carriers. The road between Worcester and Providence had left little custom for them.
Massachusetts was canal-minded in 1825. The artificially constructed inland waterway had demonstrated its usefulness in the carrying of bulky freight, which constituted by far the greater part of the young nation's com- merce. The Erie Canal was completed and began operation in that year, and no one doubted that it would be a great commercial success. It had also taught the lesson that apparently unsurmountable obstacles could be over- come by sound engineering.
The Erie Canal suggested an alluring thought, a connection eastward with the port of Boston. It was the old project of the Massachusetts Canal to the Connecticut River, but on a far more ambitious scale. It would be possible for a canal boat to start at Boston and end its voyage at the Great Lakes ; and on its return journey to carry a cargo of the products of the great Central West.
On February 25, 1825, practically simultaneously with the passage of the Blackstone Canal Act, the Legislature voted to appoint a commission "to ascertain the practicability of making a canal from Boston Harbor to the Connecticut River and of extending same to some point on the Hudson in the State of New York in the vicinity of the junction of the Erie Canal with the river."
Two routes were under consideration, the southern through Worcester, the northern, known as the Millers Falls route, through Fitchburg. A choice was definitely made in January, 1826, when Governor Levi Lincoln announced that the northern route was beyond comparison the more practical and advan- tageous, and strongly urged the construction of the canal by the Common- wealth.
The route was practically that of the present main line of the Fitchburg Railroad, beginning at the Charles River, through Cambridge, Watertown,
BOSTON TURNPIKE AND LAKE QUINSIGAMOND BRIDGE, ANCIENT HIGHWAY
Built in 1807 and approached by pontoon bridge, now a four-lane concrete motor road, connecting by air-line Worcester and Boston
Photo by Paul W. Savage
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Waltham, Weston, Lincoln, Concord, Sudbury, Acton, Boxboro, Littleton, Groton, Shirley, and, in Worcester County, Leominster, Lunenburg, Fitch- burg, Westminster, Ashburnham, Winchendon, Royalston, and Athol, and in Franklin County from Orange to Greenfield. Beyond that town, the project was practical from an engineering standpoint, except that it involved the boring of a tunnel through Hoosac Mountain. Four hundred locks would be required. The high point was Mud Pond in Ashburnham, 899 feet above the Connecticut River and 1,065 feet above sea level, in other words the eastern terminus.
But before any work had been done, the State of Massachusetts experi- enced a bit of rare good fortune in the form of Bunker Hill Monument. A railroad had been built, one of the first in the country, to haul the stone from the Neponset River to the monument site. Its efficiency was apparent to all. The future of inland transportation was plainly written. Had Massachusetts undertaken to defray the cost of a canal of this magnitude through a country so beset with obstacles, the cost would have been well-nigh ruinous.
The problem was very different from that of the Erie Canal. It was not one of distance ; the Erie Canal is 387 miles long, while the route proposed for the Massachusetts Canal was hardly half that distance. But it involved the tremendous lift of nearly a thousand feet. Finally, it must penetrate Hoosac Mountain, as the railroad did years later. The engineers of 1825 estimated the cost of boring this huge hole a distance of four and a half miles through solid rock at $1,500,000. It cost the railroad $15,000,000 for an infinitely more simple tunnel.
The canal tunnel would have required a channel and towpath, and a suffi- cient overhead room, which would total a cross-section of extraordinary size, as tunnels are rated. The drilling would have been done by hand; a century ago there were no power drills operated by steam, compressed air or elec- tricity. Nor were there high explosives. And, most important obstacle of all, perhaps, there was no such thing as ventilating apparatus. Men could not have worked at a distance from the openings, the atmosphere would have become so vitiated for lack of replenishment, and so poisonous after blasting. Even had the tunnel been completed, it is doubtful if a horse could have labored to haul a canal boat in air so dead and humid. However, it does not matter what might have been. The Bunker Hill Railway put a quick check upon the enterprise.
The Coming of the Railroads-The railroad era in Worcester County began with the opening of the Boston & Worcester Railroad in 1835. The same year saw the first train pass over the Boston and Lowell Railroad.
Wor .- 34
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These were the New England pioneers in steam transport, excepting for the little "experiment" railroad, as it was called, which hauled the stone for Bunker Hill Monument from the Neponset River, whither it was carried by water from the Quincy quarry. The first American railway was the Balti- more and Ohio, but in the beginning its motive power was horses, which traveled between the tracks after the fashion of the horse-cars of the cities in a later day. A newspaper account printed in 1830 tells us: "We have frequent accounts of the great rage for riding on the Baltimore Railroad, and the facilities at present offered the travelers for that purpose," and again on September 6, 1831 : "We learn that transportation of passengers on the Balti- more and Ohio Railroad will hereafter be by locomotive steam engine; the cars will now be conveyed by engine just constructed, fully capable of trans- porting twenty tons, including weight of the cars and one hundred and fifty passengers."
History repeated itself in the protest of the ignorant against the idea of a railroad. The same kind of talk was heard as that of two centuries previous, when the stagecoach came into being in England. It looks as if the stage- coach interests conducted an unorganized propaganda against what they saw would be the end of, or at any rate a great detriment to, their business. There were other people who maintained that canal boats were as fast as any railroad engine could go, and that a gale of wind could stop a train in its tracks. One sage argued that no engine could go in the night time, because scripturally-though hardly pertinently-"The night-time is a period when no man can work." A caustic critic set forth: "We are told that we are to gallop at the speed of twelve miles an hour, with the aid of the devil, sitting as postillion in the forehouse, and an honorable member sitting behind him to stir up the fire and keep it at full speed. I will show you they cannot go six ; I may be able to show that we can keep up with them by the canal. Thus, sir, I prove that locomotive engines cannot move more than four and one- fourth miles per hour, and I will show the whole scheme to be bottomed on deception and fallacy."
More practical souls, who knew no better, believed the farmers would be ruined. Horses would have to be killed, because they would be useless, and therefore there would be no market for oats or hay; and the hens would refuse to lay because of the infernal noise.
In Worcester the project of a railroad connecting the town with Boston met with no financial enthusiasm. Many well-to-do people declined positively to invest in the stock of the company. They had lost the money they had put into the Boston and Worcester Turnpike, and more in the Blackstone Canal, and did not propose to be caught again. They had not long to live before they deeply regretted their decision, for the road was a money-maker from
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the first day of its operation. As it was, not more than $5,000 of Worcester money went into the purchase of railroad stock. But investors elsewhere were glad to buy the securities.
The company was chartered in 1831, and the work of construction pro- ceeded rapidly. The engineers who laid out the route were most capable men. Lake Quinsigamond was avoided by skirting its southern extremity, and the lofty range of hills to the east of Worcester was penetrated through a con- venient gap in Grafton. To this day no improvement in route, excepting in trivial detail, has ever been brought forward as a practical alternative.
In 1834 trains were running out of Boston as far as Westboro. The Fourth of July, 1835, was celebrated in Worcester by the arrival of the first trainload of passengers. The story of that train is related in the chapter devoted to the Diary of Christopher Columbus Baldwin.
Lincoln, in 1836, wrote of the new railroad: "The road, extending forty-four miles eastward is laid with a single track of edge rails on cast iron chairs resting on wooden sleepers, bedded in trench filled with stone. The cost of construction has been $1,500,000, including land, labor, cars, engines and buildings. Passenger cars go in each direction, three times daily during the warm weather, and twice in the cold season, except on Sundays. The time is from two and a half to three hours, including stops at ten places. The fare has been $1.50, but in the autumn of 1836 was raised to $2. The freight of merchandise from Boston to Worcester, by the ton is $3.50; from Worces- ter to Boston $3. A branch railroad is soon to be laid to Millbury."
The railroad was of the crudest description, of course. It could not have been otherwise. Steam locomotion was in its swaddling clothes. Everything considered, wonders had been accomplished. Only a few years had elapsed since the first locomotive had demonstrated that a vehicle could be propelled by steam power. Looking backward it seems a great mechanical and engi- neering feat, that the Boston and Worcester railroad was able even to approach regular schedule time on a line forty-four miles long. And that the sturdy little engine "Meteor" hauled the first long passenger train from Boston to Worcester, up a grade that totalled more than four hundred and fifty feet of sheer rise, in three hours, is almost beyond belief. Yet that was what she did. The chance of mishap, however, was always present, and there were many accidents.
The locomotive was of the simplest construction, with boiler and engine carried on a wooden platform which was mounted on a single four-wheel truck. Its fuel was wood, and it was not until some time later that the stack was equipped with spark arresters. It simply vomited live coals, which at times made things lively for the passengers in the coaches, and in dry weather
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set fire to woodland and grassland. There was trouble also with escaping live steam, which on occasions reached travelers, with painful consequences.
The cars were little more than stagecoach bodies, each mounted on a single truck. Their brakes were violent of action, and produced a series of shocks which were compared to the effects of a collision. Nor was it a difficult mat- ter to derail or overturn a car. One old habitue of the stagecoach put it: "You got upset in a coach-and there you were! You get upset in a rail-car -and, damme, where are you?"
Another always present source of trouble, and sometimes of serious acci- dents, was the "snakes' heads." The rails were nothing more than heavy strap iron fastened to stout timbers carried on ties, which were ballasted in broken stone. They were held down by spikes driven into the wood, and these were worked loose by the hammering of car-wheels, which were of cast iron and probably not nearly absolutely round; and by the expansion of the metal in summer and its contraction in winter. When a spike lost its grip, the end of the rail curved up, rearing its end like the head of a snake about to strike. Sometimes the "snake's head" caused derailment, with more or less serious consequences. Sometimes it ripped along through the coach floor, and if a passenger were so unfortunate as to be in its course, there was injury, which in some cases was severe and even fatal. A few roads carried their rails pinned down on a buried "continuous stone wall," but the unyield- ing foundation caused such a jarring to passengers as to make travel well- nigh intolerable, and stone was replaced with wood.
In spite of disadvantages, which we of today realize far more clearly than did those who traveled in the 1830's, the Boston & Worcester Railroad started right in to a very profitable business. In the six months from July I to December 30, 1835, receipts from passenger traffic were $72,912.12 and from freight $18,828.21, and the net income was $51,272.67. The whole number of passengers carried was 72,558, an average of 460 a day, and of these, 37,700 traveled the full distance between Worcester and Boston. Trains made 757 trips in the average time between the terminal towns of two hours and fifty minutes-which was not so slow and undependable, after all; and 533 trips were made with freight cars.
In the following year receipts from passengers were $118,233.44 and from freight $59,836.93, and the net income was $17,807.37. In that year 2,807 passengers were carried to and from Southboro and Westboro, 2,771 to and from Grafton, and 11,161 to and from Worcester.
In considering Worcester, a town of some 4,500 inhabitants, as a terminus, the number of its stores tabulated by Lincoln is interesting, as follows: Gro- ceries, sixteen ; dry goods, sixteen ; crockery, two ; hardware, three ; iron, one; wool, three; flour and grain, four; coal, two; provisions, four; fruit and confectionery, six ; drugs and medicines, four ; books and stationery, three;
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music and umbrellas, one ; hats and furs, five ; shoes and leather, six ; dresses and millinery, five; jewelry and watches, four ; cabinet furniture, two; carpet warehouses, two; and drapers' and tailors' shops, five. The town had four banks, three insurance offices, an insurance agency, and four printing offices.
Western Railroad Built-When it was suggested from time to time that the Boston and Worcester Railroad be extended to Albany, much derisive comment was aroused. Captain Basil Hall, an English engineer, in his Travels in North America, describes a stage ride to Albany taken in 1829, and after telling of the ravines and gorges and high, rocky hills, remarks: "These Yankees talk of constructing a railroad over this route ; as a practical engineer I pronounce it simply impossible."
The Boston Courier had expressed a similar opinion two years earlier in an editorial, which said : "Alcibiades, or some other great man of antiquity, it is said, cut off his dog's tail that the quidnuncs might not become extinct from want of excitement. Some such notion, no doubt, moved one or two of our national and experimental philosophers to get up the project of a railroad from Boston to Albany, a project, which every one knows, who knows the simplest rules of arithmetic, to be impracticable, but at an expense little less than the market value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and which, if practical would be as useless as a railroad from Boston to the moon."
Even before the Boston and Worcester and Boston and Lowell Railroads had proved that the steam railway was not only an essential means of com- munication and transport but a money-making investment, the idea of a rail- road extending west from the terminus of the Boston and Worcester at Worcester, to Springfield and on to Albany on the Hudson, had taken a strong hold upon the imagination of wealthy interests in Boston. Engineers had pronounced the difficulties to be encountered in the high country of western Massachusetts by no means insurmountable.
As a result of this deep interest, a charter was granted to the Western Railroad Company, February 15, 1833, with the right to construct the line to the western boundary of Springfield, and thence to the western boundary of the State. A mass meeting was held in Faneuil Hall, Boston, October 7, 1835, to take measures to insure subscriptions to the capital stock of $2,000,000. This amount was quickly disposed of, and the following winter the Legislature authorized the Commonwealth to become a subscriber for an additional $1,000,000. The capital stock thus became $3,000,000.
There was little delay in beginning construction of the line to Springfield. From an engineering point of view the undertaking was far more ambitious than that of the Boston and Worcester. The grade is a heavy one. The rise from Worcester to the height of land at Charlton, a distance of some ten
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miles, is over 400 feet. It was a valuable experience as a preliminary to the still more formidable grades of the route from Springfield to the New York line.
Trains commenced their regular trips between Worcester and Springfield October 1, 1839, the fifty-five miles being covered in about three hours, which was really excellent time. On October 3 a great public dinner was given in Springfield to commemorate the event, which was of utmost impor- tance to that Connecticut River town, as well as the forerunner of through traffic to the West.
The principal address was given by Edward Everett, who had been deeply concerned in the project from its beginning. In the course of his remarks he said : "Let us contemplate the entire railroad, with its cars and engines, as one vast machine. What a portent of art! Its fixed portion one hundred miles long ; its movable portion flying across the State like a weaver's shuttle. By the seaside in the morning, here at noon ; and back in the compass of an autumnal day! And the power which puts all in motion, most wondrous, a few buckets of water! Did we live in a poetic age, we have now reached the region where the genius of steam communication would be personified and embodied. Here we should be taught to behold him a titanic colossus of iron and of brass, instinct with elemental life and power, with a glowing furnace for the lungs, and streams of fire and smoke for the breath of his nostrils. With one hand he collects the furs of the Arctic circle, with the other he smites the forests of western Pennsylvania. He plants his right foot before the source of the Missouri and his left on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and gathers in his bosom the overflowing abundance of the fairest and richest valley on which the circling sun looks down."
Three years later, in 1842, the line was completed through to Albany, the section in the State of New York being constructed by the Albany and West Stockbridge Railroad, which had been chartered in 1836. The Boston and Worcester, the Western and the Albany & West Stockbridge were brought together in a single corporation, under the name of the Boston & Albany Railroad, and has been operated for many years as the Boston & Albany Division of the New York Central system.
Quick transport had been provided from Worcester County to the Hudson River. But did a man wish to journey farther westward, the way was long and tedious. Leaving Worcester in the morning he would be in Albany by night. But the next eight days must be spent on a packet boat on the Erie Canal, at $5 a day for transportation and board, and the rest of the distance from Buffalo made by water on the Great Lakes. Chicago was twenty-one days from Worcester. Today the commonplace time is 24 hours. Or, in that same time, by air, one may travel from coast to coast.
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The Norwich and Providence Railroads-The valleys of the Quine- baug River, as it is called in Worcester County, which becomes the Thames in Connecticut, and of the Blackstone River lent themselves naturally as ave- nues for railroad building, and thus to establishing Worcester as a railroad center. The first to be utilized for the purpose was the Quinnebaug, which was made the route of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad. The Connecticut company was chartered in 1832 and the Massachusetts company in the fol- lowing years. But the road did not begin transportation until 1840. It immediately became an important passenger line, especially in conjunction with the Sound steamers which plied between Norwich and New York. The two corporations were consolidated under the same name while the work of construction was still under way.
Then came the Providence and Worcester Railroad, chartered in 1844 and opened in 1847. This, too, quickly became an important line, connecting Worcester with tidewater at Providence, where also connection was made with New York boats.
South County Railroads-While the Providence & Worcester and Norwich & Worcester Railroads served a large part of the south county, including most of the manufacturing villages, several industrial centers were still without railroad facilities. Most important of these was Southbridge. One early attempt to secure steam communication failed. Soon after the completion of the Boston & Worcester Railroad, a branch line was built to Millbury. In 1851 the Millbury & Southbridge Railroad Company was chartered, and two years later a location for the proposed line was filed, from Millbury and across Auburn and Oxford to French River, and thence to Webster and Southbridge. But there was disagreement, and nothing came of the plan.
The history of the railroad which now enters Southbridge began in 1846, when the Walpole Railroad was chartered, running from the Dedham Branch line to Walpole. This was followed by the chartering of the Norfolk Rail- road which extended the line to Blackstone. Finally the Blackstone & South- bridge Railroad Company, was chartered in 1849, and the following year the three companies were consolidated as the Midland Railroad Company, which extended the road to Boston. But there were many delays, and it was not until 1866 that the first train entered Southbridge. Several years of receiver- ships followed, but in 1873 the charter passed to the New England Railroad, and the line was absorbed by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Rail- road soon after it was incorporated in 1907.
The project has been afoot for many years to build a line connecting Southbridge with the Boston & Albany at Palmer. It was first proposed in
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1863. In 1872 the town of Southbridge voted to subscribe a large sum of money to the building of the Southbridge and Palmer Railroad. But the Massachusetts railroad commissioners refused the necessary permission. Again, in 1892, the effort was made by the chartering of the Southbridge, Sturbridge & Brookfield Railroad Company, but nothing had been done to consummate the plan when, in 1912, a new line to be known as the Southern New England Railroad was laid out, connecting the port of Providence with the Vermont Central Railroad at Palmer, which would make it an integral part of the Grand Trunk System. Work was begun on this railroad, and a large sum of money was expended. But troubles of the Grand Trunk caused a cessation of work, which has never been resumed.
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