USA > New Hampshire > Merrimack County > Concord > History of Concord, New Hampshire, from the original grant in seventeen hundred and twenty-five to the opening of the twentieth century, Volume II > Part 21
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The massive machine shop built of brick in 1848, three hundred feet long by sixty-five feet wide, said then to be unexcelled by any railroad shop in the United States, proved adequate to meet for half a century the requirements of the road. Harvey Rice was the vul- can in charge of one wing of it, while John Kimball in the other was master of such as worked in wood, succeeding in 1851 to the care of the whole. As many as twenty-five new engines were constructed in this shop, the second " Tahanto " being the first undertaking of that sort. They were completing the last of a group of three engines in
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HISTORY OF CONCORD.
this shop on January 1, 1863, when news came of Abraham Lincoln's proclamation freeing the slaves. Mr. B. A. Kimball took a bit of chalk, and wrote on the tender " Liberty," and that was adopted as the name of the engine.
The passenger station built in 1847, sixty-three by two hundred feet, the second one to occupy the square, was a dignified example of the railroad archi- tecture of its time. Richard Bond, of Boston, was the de- signer, and Captain PhilipWat- son the master builder. Wait- ing rooms, baggage and ex- press apartments, platforms, and trucks occupied the lower Second Passenger Station. story, of course, and broad,
easy stairways led up to offices and a good square hall, where safety was assured, and speech and song were easy, except when some belated disturbing engine went coughing past.
In that hall Teresa Parodi, Anna Bishop, and Adalina Patti (a girl of ten years in 1853) sung, Robert Bochsa struck the tuneful harp, and Ole Bull enchanted the public with his violin. Thomas Starr King, John G. Saxe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured there, and there were held various political assem- blies of note and consequence. It was a common public meeting place-the Mars hill of Concord-until 1855, when Phenix hall was built. This station house was burned February 2, 1859.
The third passenger station endured from 1860 until 1885, but was not espe- cially noteworthy.
In 1845 the Concord Railroad equip- ment of rolling stock was stated at five ten-ton engines, six baggage cars, six long and two short passenger cars, and enough freight cars to be equivalent to one hundred and thirty-cight single Third Passenger Station. ones,-a single car, as reckoned then, being one half the length, and less than half the capacity of the car now in universal use.
There were at the outset three daily trains between Concord and Boston, the cars to each train between Concord and Nashua averag- ing one and a half. The departures hence in 1845 were at 4:45
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CONCORD AS A RAILROAD CENTER.
a. m., 11 : 30 a. m., and 3: 25 p. m. The second train from Concord was advertised to arrive in Boston in season for passengers to take the 4 o'clock train to New York. The train which left Boston at 5 p. m. arrived in Concord three and a half hours later. This time was gradually reduced until in 1849, when the ordinary time between Concord and Boston was two and three quarters hours. Now Con- cord people have their choice of eleven trains at varying rates of speed.
The town boys were wont to observe new engines and discuss the merits of the " Passaconaways," "Wonolancets," and " Old Craw- fords," as they came and went. The wood-burning engine "Amos- keag," which brought the first passenger train into Concord, had a single pair of driving-wheels five feet in diameter. It glistened with brass trimmings, but the engineer and fireman had protection from neither cold nor storm. There were brakes operated by hand, such having succeeded the foot-brakes in earliest use. Reversing the engine while in motion was a matter of uncertainty, for the hooks which threw the valves might not catch at the will of the engineer. The link action governed by the reverse lever now in use had been devised, but not adopted generally by engine builders.
It was difficult, with the smaller engines and infrequent trains, to keep the tracks clear of midwinter snow. Often three engines were clamped together behind a snow-plow, and a force of men summoned from the machine shops and elsewhere to make a tedious struggle with big white drifts at Bow Locks and Reed's Ferry.
The welfare of a railroad is largely in the hands of men on the engine. Fortunate is the corporation served by such as William H. Hopkins, William Upton, and Charles F. Barrett, men of the forties, now all gone, the last named after a service of forty-three years with- out accident, and the second after not many years less service. It was a lesson in dynamics to see how gently a train started when either of them opened the valve.
The passenger cars were light in weight, set on elliptic or spiral springs, and the draw bars were coupled with links and pins. The brakes were operated by hand, and there were stuffed leathern buffers to take part of the shock of reducing speed. The spermaceti whale provided material for lighting and lubricating, and James Tallant, a New Bedford man, was employed to sec that the supply was what it should be. Ordinary wood-stoves were used in winter. Baggage was put on board with its destination chalked upon it. Passage tickets were used over and over again, neither numbered, dated, nor punched, until they were somewhat startling in their antiquity and dinginess.
There were three sets of engines, engine crews, and conductors
1.4
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between Boston and Concord. Each passenger who started below Nashua, going beyond Concord, surrendered his passage ticket to the Concord company's conductor, and received therefor a card, entitled a check, to his destination. If such passenger was going beyond White River Junction, another exchange occurred on the Northern Railroad, and so on. The many such checks needful to an assortment bur- dened each conductor with a long box divided into many compart- ments, which vexed his soul and lessened his dignity. Coupon tick- ets, which did away with a good deal of rubbish, were adopted late in the fifties.
Out on the road the conductor could hardly communicate with the engineer. He could hang out signals for stops at way stations, or for an immediate halt he might put on a brake, and the engineer would notice a drag to the speed as one person feels another jerking at his coat-tail. The train in motion swayed along as if each coach had some separate intent, unlike the compact movement which adds so much to the majesty of a train to-day, and which mod- ern platforms, couplers, and ves- tibules make possible. Every wheel hammered the imperfectly fastened rail joints with a noisy shock. Much more comfortable is now the Boston & Maine ex- press to St. Paul of eleven cars, Boston & Maine St. Paul Express. which engine " 574" whirls over the road to Concord in two hours from Boston, the passengers all at their ease, while the engineer, like Jove on high Olympus, with one valve controls the speed, with another the brakes, and with still another warms the train.
The power of the engine has expanded step by step: Ten tons weight in 1842, fourteen in 1845, twenty in 1847, twenty-three in 1848, twenty-six in 1854, thirty in 1865, thirty-four in 1875, forty- six in 1885, fifty-seven in 1890, fifty-eight in 1895, sixty-five in 1897. This is the weight of engines without tenders.
The speed of express trains hereabout has not greatly increased. The St. Paul's School Christmas "Special " for New York may run to Nashua in forty-one minutes, but Engineer Charles F. Barrett in 1850 made the same run with the " Mameluke " and six passenger cars in only a minute more than that.
There was an element of bravado about train handling in the forties and the fifties. What the engineer did, how he did it, and what
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train he was running, were topics of table talk. He threw the train, carrying a brakeman to every two cars, into the station with a flying switch, while the engine went hissing away on a side track. The conductor alighted in the grand manner from the head of the train to the high platform and announced the station at some window of each car as they all went by. He carried himself as if he were master of a Collins steamship. While he might not have the same social dis- tinction as a bishop, still he took place near the sunny end of a tav- ern dinner-table.
In 1850 the superintendent had a salary of two thousand dollars a year ; the president, the treasurer, the two master mechanics, and the road-master, one thousand dollars each, and the ticket agent eight hundred dollars. The passenger-train conductors were paid fifty dollars a month, freight conductors the same. Engineers on passen- ger trains got two dollars and twenty-five cents a day, on freight trains two dollars (a trip to Nashua and back being reckoned as a day). Brakemen on freight trains were paid one dollar and fifty cents a day, on passenger trains one dollar and twenty-five cents. The wages of mechanics in the machine shop ranged from one dollar to one dollar and seventy-five cents a day, there being, however, one blacksmith who had two dollars. Station agents' pay ranged from one dollar a day at Robinson's Ferry to eight hundred dollars a year at Manchester. Switchmen were paid one dollar and twenty-five cents a day, some of them a little less.
The accounts in the passenger department under John H. Elliott, who had been a stageman, were an enlargement of stagemen's methods; those of the freight department in charge of R. B. Sher- burne were like those of the Boston & Concord Boating company, of which he had been an agent.1 About 1854 some improvements which had been devised by an accountant of the Eastern Railroad were adopted. The growth of railroad systems has not made their bookkeeping very much more complicated ; now one consolidated entry determines how much freight money the agent of the largest station should remit for a month's collections.
The dividends which the Concord company made to its share- holders in the early time, 1843 to 1849, were highly satisfactory, but no corporation plods its doubtful way into the sunshine of success without finding rivals that would divide the fruits of the endeavor. In 1848 the Portsmouth & Concord Railroad had been partially com- pleted, and was struggling to reach Concord. The legislature of that year on June 23 granted that company a charter for a branch from some point on its line to some point in Manchester. It was ' He began with the Merrimack Boating company in 1818.
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represented (queerly enough in view of what has since happened), that no route could be found for such a branch in a tolerably direct line between Portsmouth and Manchester, but from a point in Hook- sett this branch could be built. When the Portsmouth main line should reach Concord, if this Hooksett branch, as it was called, werc built to Manchester, there would be, by connection with the Man- chester & Lawrence line, another route hence to Boston, not so good as the existing one, but capable of harm. Here was a situation that might have been met in various ways. Some people would have made a noisy wrangle about it. The Concord Railroad was wiser than that. It kindly took the new-comer by the hand, loaned it fifty thousand dollars in 1849 (for which it had legislative permission), and never sought repayment, brought it into Concord parallel with its own tracks in 1852, and persuaded it to abandon the Hooksett branch.
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Modern Type of Locomotive.
Until about 1849 the Concord company's engines, "Souhegan," " Penacook," "Tahanto," and the like, were built by Hinkley & Drury (afterward the Boston Locomotive Works); then the Amos- keag Manufacturing company, following an example set long before by the Locks and Canal company of Lowell, permitted the agent of its machine shop to go into engine-making. The Amoskeag com- pany naturally claimed as a customer the railroad which ran past its door, and turned out engines like the "General Stark," in August, 1849, and later the " Rob Roy " and the " Ixion," with more steam- making capacity than had been usual. As engine-building increased
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CONCORD AS A RAILROAD CENTER.
at Manchester, the tracks of the railroad beeame a practice-ground for produets of the shop, and it was a rather common sight for a passenger train to come into Coneord drawn by a "Gray Eagle " or a " White Cloud," designed for some Western railroad, resplendent in brass, with a cast-iron Sambo holding the signal flag out in front. George Harrison Prescott, the Amoskeag company's engineer, now of Terre Haute, Indiana, stood at the valve, and Oliver W. Bayley, the manager of their machine shop, often sat on the woodpile in the tender, with his fierce moustache bristling on a delighted face.
It was in 1850 that the " Mameluke " came out of the Amoskeag shop, and startled the engineers and mechanics with queer inside and outside connections, and driving-wheels seven feet high. This engine had some weeks' trial on the Concord road, but was sold to some more ambitious company. In order that General Franklin Pierce might serve some client in a morning court here, and also appear in the Parker murder trial on the same forenoon in Man- chester, the " Mameluke " made a special run with the distinguished advocate as a passenger hence to Manchester in twenty minutes.
In the early months of the Civil War, the government sought here for railway property ready to its hand ; and New Hampshire soldiers by the Rapidan or the Rappahannock afterward had something like a glimpse of home when they saw there some engine which had been almost as familiar to their sight as the hearth on which they were reared.
In 1850, the Manchester & Lawrence Railroad being opened to Manchester, competition began in the matter of passage rates and speed. Two express trains, additional to such trains as were run- ning between Concord and Boston, were put on the route via Lowell, the Boston & Lowell company providing one train all the way, and the Concord company the other. The downward time of these trains was fixed at one hour and fifty-five minutes ; returning, it was two hours. Seth Hopkins, with his strong, unflinching hand, ran the "General Stark " engine on the Concord company's train at the pre- scribed speed, safely, to the admiration of the gossips along the line.
The station where these trains were delivered in Boston was at the hither end of Lowell street, a small structure with two tracks, and when outward trains were ready to depart therefrom, Station Master Pettengill was accustomed to ring a loud peal on a two hun- dred pound bell, and proclaim the destination of the ears so loudly that the wayfaring man though a fool need not err.
On November 1, 1850, the Concord company took a lease of the Manchester & Lawrence, and thus terminated an extravagant rivalry. The Concord & Portsmouth, which by reason of foreclosure and
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reorganization had undergone a slight change of name, was likewise leased September 11, 1858.
There were periods while the Manchester & Lawrence was under lease to the Concord company (leases of November, 1850, and December, 1856), during which the line from Concord to Lawrence was worked, so far as passenger trains were concerned, as if it were the main line of the company. Engines made round trips between Concord and Lawrence, and the road between Manchester and Nashua was operated as if it were a branch, but this resulted in 1865 in a contract by which the roads below Nashua accept- ed for their forty-miles haul the same fraction of earnings as was paid to the line between Lawrence and Boston for a twenty-six mile haul.
Railroad Square, 1858, Showing Portsmouth R. R. Station.
The railroads connecting Concord with the upper country were all in operation before 1850, gathering busi- ness for the Merrimack Valley line. There were at the outset only two daily passenger trains on each of those up-country roads. One of those trains on the Northern only ran as far as Franklin on the main line. During the dull winter of 1857-'58, passenger trains be- low Concord were reduced to two, with a proportionate reduction in freight trains.
There were ten years following 1857 which were not propitious to the Concord Railroad. The controlling hand had been changed, and the performances of certain of its agents gave rise to more than ordinary criticism. Some of the topics discussed were dealt with ultimately in the law courts and fill pages of reports to stockholders. It was a time of dash and sputter, frivolity and waste.
During that period Concord lost its direct route to Portsmouth, it being broken in 1861 by removal of the rails between Suncook and Candia. The motives behind this transaction, other than those publicly stated, need not be sought out. Authority for it was obtained from the legislature of that year by various misrepresenta- tions, one of the most effectual being the statement that the grades going south between Suncook and Candia were almost insurmount- able. In this view the members of the legislature were invited to make an inspection of the road. A train of six cars was made up, drawn by the engine " Portsmouth," which had 22x14 inch cylinders -less than the capacity of other locomotives of that time. The master mechanic of the road was in charge of the engine. The
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superintendent was on the train, and the promoters of the Candia branch scheme distributed themselves among the passengers. The train went on its way smoothly until beyond Suncook, and would have continued to do so, but for an oceurrence which may best be told in the words of him who was in charge of the engine. He says :
All went well until we were on the middle of the grade between Head's pond and Rowe's crossing, and the Superintendent discovered that the train would climb the grade successfully. He came on to the engine over the back end of the tender, and said he would hold the throttle the rest of the way. He had the wood watered before it went into the fire-box, and worked the engine so as to reduce its effective force, which he knew well enough how to do, until the train eame to a stand just as it was reaching the summit. The law makers gathered around, and he, mounting the tender, exelaimed, "You can see, gentlemen, what kind of a road this is. Best engine on the line cannot draw this train over the hill." All appeared to be convinced, and the train baeked to Concord.
So it came about that the direct line to Portsmouth was broken, as it has since remained. The majority of people were perhaps too fully occupied to bestow much attention on affairs like this. The Civil War had come; its busy, anxious years, though fruitful of railroad traffic, were not proportionately gainful to the Concord Railroad ; the volume of traffic and the net earnings were not in harmonious relations to each other; so in 1866 the end, which some had foreseen, came, and the second period of management was closed.
The list of directors chosen in May, 1866, did not contain the name of any one who had before held such position. Josiah Minot became president of the company, and James R. Kendrick, superin- tendent. The new people, directors, and managers were in control four years. The gross earnings (that is, those of the Concord and Manchester & Lawrence roads, stated together) for the year ending March 31, 1866, were eight hundred sixty-seven thousand nine hun- dred fifty-six dollars and seventy-four cents. By direction of the leg- islature the Manchester & Lawrence road was operated by itself between August 1, 1867, and March 30, 1870 (when the Concord directorate again changed), and yet, for the year ending on the last mentioned date, the gross earnings of the Concord company were eight hundred fifty-five thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents, although there had been a reduction of freight rates and fares ; in the latter respect there was a change from the two dollar and ninety cent rate of 1864 to two dollars and twenty eents as the fare to Boston. The dividends had risen from the seven per cent. rate of 1862-'63 to the ten per cent. rate of 1846-'49,
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The road had now been in operation twenty-eight years, and had proved what it could do under widely differing conditions. So suffi- cient an authority as J. Gregory Smith once said, that in view of its moderate cost, easy grades, susceptibility to repair, and abundant traffic, the Concord was the best piece of railroad in the world. Nothing better can be said of it than that during all its independent existence no passenger within its cars received fatal injury on its road or on roads which it controlled.
Mention has been made on a preceding page of human willingness to share in any good thing which the capital of another has builded. An example of this trait was manifested in 1868, when, on June 17, an act was introduced in the state legislature to create the "Concord Railroad,"-a corporate body with a title like that of the existing company, only the word " corporation " being omitted. This act went to the judiciary committee June 22, was returned July 1, and indefinitely postponed. Its terms provided that the state should, by virtue of a stipulation in the charter of the Concord Railroad corpor- ation, take the property from its shareholders at a valuation of one million five hundred thousand dollars and turn it over for one million seven hundred thousand dollars to certain grantees named in the new act. The state was, of course, to gain the difference of two hundred thousand dollars, and also an annual sum of fifteen thousand dollars, which the grantees were to pay out of the earnings of the new com- pany. The intent of this proposal will be the more apparent when it is remembered that the market value of the property of the old cor- poration was then considerably more than two millions of dollars. Among the grantees named in this act were some of those who seven years before were active agents in tearing up the rails between Sun- cook and Candia.
Almost twenty years later (that is, in 1887) Austin Corbin of New York, with certain associates, offered half a million dollars premium for the right, which he supposed the state to have, to take the Concord Railroad from its shareholders, by virtue of the seven- teenth section of its charter, and in 1891 he doubled the amount of the offer ; but on reference to the state supreme court it was decided that such right to take the road for less than its value, without the shareholders' consent, did not exist.
During the fiscal year which ended with March 31, 1870, there were very considerable changes in the ownership of Concord Railroad shares, and it became evident that the control had gone to such as would choose a new board of directors at the annual meeting in the following May. Such directors were chosen on May 24, at a meeting enlivened and adorned by the presence of General Benjamin F.
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Butler; but before their accession the Concord Railroad property had been turned over to the managers of the Northern Railroad by virtue of a contract, executed by the outgoing directors, intended to remain in force for five years from April 15, 1870. Under the terms of that contract the Northern Railroad was to operate the Concord Railroad and its branches, keep the property in repair, and return it in good order at the expiration of the contract. It was to pay the necessary taxes, and provide the sum of seventy-five thousand dollars semi-annually wherewith to pay ten per cent. per annum dividends to the shareholders of the Concord Railroad, except that if the existing tariffs for passengers and freight were reduced the dividends might be reduced in like proportion.
This contract was approved by two railroad commissioners, the governor of the state, and three councilors. The governor was hin- self president of the Northern Railroad. The president of the Con- cord company was a director in the Northern.
As a matter of course proceedings at law followed. Hon. Benja- min R. Curtis, an ex-judge of the United States supreme court, ap- peared with others as counsel in the case, the state court appointed receivers who took possession of the property, September 12, 1870, and the new board of directors did not come into control until Jan- uary 14, 1871. For the period during which it held possession the Northern Railroad ultimately paid thirty thousand dollars more than it was to have paid under the terms of the contract.
Accretions to the Concord Railroad system have never been made in haste. The gain of the Manchester & Lawrence in 1850 and 1856, and the Concord & Portsmouth in 1858-'62, has been mentioned. In 1868 the Concord company acquired the Manchester & North Weare road; in 1869, the Suncook Valley ; in 1876, the Nashua, Acton & Boston, and in 1881, a half interest in the Manchester & Keene. For about a year and a half, from August 1, 1881, to Feb- ruary 28, 1883, the Boston & Lowell, the Nashua & Lowell, and the Concord railroads were operated as one, this arrangement being ter- minated on the motion of the latter company.
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