USA > New York > Monroe County > Rochester > History of Rochester and Monroe county, New York, from the earliest historic times to the beginning of 1907 > Part 9
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established in 1812, when there were no residents here. It has always been known as the Rapids burying-ground.
CENTER MARKET.
One does not need to be a very old resident to remember the Center market, one of the landmarks of Rochester, which stood where a city building de- voted to various municipal purposes is now. It must have been built in 1836 or 1837, for O'Reil- ly's "Sketches of Rochester," published in 1838, calls it "the new market." and says of it:
"This edifice is creditable to the city. There is but one mar- ket-house in the U'mion, and that is in Boston, which can be compared with this market in sta general errangements. It is about two hundred feet long, extending along the west bank of the Genesce river, the water washing its basement and afording facilities for cleansing the building. The wings extend about eighty feet from either end on the west side, thus forming three aides of s aquare facing on Front street and having a new street called Market street opened in front of it up to State areet, The edifice is substantially as well as tastefully con- structed, the basement story being of cut stone and the super- structure of brick. The parts of the main building fronting on the square are supported by stone columns, with large doors and windows with green blinds, presenung an appearance unsur- passed by the lower part of any range of stores in the city. The stalis are arranged on the cast ade of the main building and on the north and south sides of the wings, which are all connected."
The edifice was rendered conspicuous from a distance by the well-carved wooden image of an ox, on the central point of the roof, and the interior of the market justified all the praise bestowed upon it, for the stalls were kept in the best of order, the marble counters were always spotlessly clean, and for the twenty years of its use for that pur- pose no householders except those living in a re- mote quarter of the city ever thought of purchas- ing their meat elsewhere.
MILITARY COMPANIES.
This brings us to a mention of the military com- panies of that period, before the organization of the Fifty-fourth regiment of New York state mil- itia, most of which occupied the different rooms of the basement of the city market for their respective armories, the two brass bands of that day. Adams's and Holloway'a, having their quarters there also. The earliest organization in this region was a com- pany of riffemen that was formed in Penfield as far back as 1818, which attracted enlistments from Rochester as our little community increased in number. Ashbel W. Riley, mentioned elsewhere in this volume for his heroic exertions at the time of the cholera, was early connected with this com-
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OLD CENTER MARKET.
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pany, which under his command as captain, at the City Dragoons in 1850. The Fifty-fourth regi. time of Lafayette's visit here in 1825, escorted thu ment of New York state militia, organized in 1849, was at first confined to the western half of the county, but in 1835 it embraced the whole of it at which time H. S. Fairchild became its colonel; although it did not go to the front during the Civil war it performed excellent servier by doing guard duty over the Confederate prisoners at El- mira in 1864; it was disbanded in December, 1880, in accordance with a sweeping change in the militia system of the state, ouly one company. known as the Eighth Separate, being retained. The First Separate company and its military services are described elsewhere. While not connected with the period of time over which we have been going, it is as well to mention in this place the Rochester Union Blues, a fine volunteer company of patriotic citizens, formed in 1863, with Charles B. Hill as captain, for the express purpose of doing duty as a home guard during the war, though it continued its organization for some years after the conflict WAS over. distinguished Frenchman from Rochester to Can- andaigua ; other formations of a similar character afterward associated themselves with this one and! all were united together as the Twenty-second reg. iment of riflemen; Colonel Riley, who had then risen to the command of it, offered its services, with the consent of the whole body, to President Jackson in 1832 to quell the nullification disturb- ance in South Carolina, but the tender was not accepted, as the assistance of state militia was no: required; the next year Colonel Riley became bri- gadier-general of riflemen, and then major-general, a position which he held till the dissolution of th- brigade a few years later. The Irish Volunteers came into existence in November, 1828, a very creditable organization whose commandant for some time was Captain P. J. MeNamara: it was attached to the One Hundred and Seventy-eighth regiment of infantry, with headquarters at Buf- falo. Then came Van Rensselaer's cavalry, in 1834, named after the landlord of the Eagle Hotel and commanded by him, and the next year the THE NEW YORK CENTRAL. Rochester Pioncer Rifles, under George Dawson, the "fighting editor," which was a part of General Riley's regiment.
In 1838 two crack companies were formed- Williams's Light Infantry, under Major John Williams, afterward mayor, and the Rochester Union Grays, whose first captain was Lansing B Swan, afterward general, who, with General Bur- roughs, codified the military laws of the state; it was originally infantry but later became an ar- tillery company. Eight of the members were still surviving at the beginning of this year, with the average age of eighty-six. The next year the Rochester City Cadets came into existence, withi James Elwood as captain ; a few years later, some time before 1849, it was reorganized as the Rochester Light Guards, with II. S. Fairchild as captain : it was this company that furnished sixty- five men to company A of the Old Thirteenth on the very day after President Lincoln's first call for troops, and many of its remaining members after- ward joined others of our fighting regiments. The German Grenadiers, the first of our Tentonic com- panies, and the Rochester Artillery were organized in 1840, the Rochester City Guards in 1844, the German Union Guards in 1842 and the Rochester
The first steam railroad operated in the United States was the Baltimore & Ohio, in 1831, and the first one that had Rochester for a station was the Tonawanda railroad, which started at the western corner of Main and Elizabeth streets, where a business block now stands .. The company was chartered in 1832 for fifty years, with a capital of $500,000; the president was Daniel Evans, the vice-president Jonathan Child, the secretary A. M. Schermerhorn and the treasurer Frederick Whittlesey. Being quite experimental the road was built by slow degrees, Elisha Johnson survey- ing the route and doing the construction, for it was completed only to South Byron in 1834, to Batavia two years later, and to Attica, forty-three miles in all, in 1842. The first train was run out a little way. with L. B. Van Dyke as conductor, on April 4th, 1837, but it was not till May 3d of that year that the first regular passenger train left for Ba- tavia, the event being celebrated here on May 11th Ground was broken for the Auburn & Rochester railroad in 1838, and in 1840 the work was suf. fieiently advanced to allow the first eastward bound train to run from here to Canandaigua on Sep- tember 10th ; the road was completed to Auburn a
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
year later, and, as the eastern connections had been laid long before that, the first train from hero to Albany ran through in October, 1841. On all these connecting roads the construction was very crude; a "strap rail" was used, merely a strip of iron two inches wide and three-fourths of an inch thick, which was spiked to a six-by-six scantling. and the ends of the rails frequently turned up, producing the dangerous "snake-heads;" it was no! till 1848 that decent iron rails were substituted.
In 1850 work was begun on the direct line from here to Syracuse; in the same year a small roa.l from Lockport to Niagara Falls was purchased and extended to this city, and in the same year the Tonawanda railroad was consolidated with the At- tica & Buffalo, though it was not till 1852 that the first through train was run from here to the last- named place, the line being then straightened from there to Batavia. The Rochester & Charlotte railroad was built in 1852, and on May 17th, 1853, all the roads that have been mentioned, together with others in the eastern part of the state, were consolidated under the title of the New York Cen- tral Railroad company, with a capital stock of 823,085,600. For thirty years the station was lo- cated on Mill street, where Central avenue now crosses it, but in 1883 the present building, exten !- ing from St. Paul to North Clinton street, was erected. That completed, at a total cost of $925,- 301.25, one of the most important works ever done in this city, when the tracks were elevated and there was an end to the useless sacrifice of life, be- sides innumerable minor casualties and the inflic- tion of almost intolerable inconvenience at the street crossings.
OTHER RAILROADS.
The successful and profitable operation of these roads running east and west stimulated the desire to push one down into the southern part of the state, and in September, 1852, a line was begun from here to Avon, which was finished in 1854. 1: was originally called the Genesee Valley railroad and that name elung to it for a long time subse- quent to its practical absorption by the Erie, shortly after its completion. on a ninety-nine years' lease. The Rochester & State Line company was formed in 1869 and work was begun two years later, but it was 1878 before the road was finished
to its original terminus at Salamanca. It was in- volved in financial difficulties from the beginning and in 1880, being unable to pay the interest on its first mortgage bonds, it was sold out to New York parties, by whom the name was changed to the Rochester & Pittsburg (the word Buffalo being for some unaccountable reason prefixed afterward) and the line was extended to Punxsutawney, in Pennsylvania. In recent years it has been pushed on to Pittsburg, and is now exceedingly prosper- ous as a coal-carrying road. The Genesee Valley Canal railroad, now a branch of the Pennsylvania, which was intended to do the same service for the villages on the west side of the river that the Erie was doing for those on the east-for the latter, though starting on the west, crosses the Genesce opposite Mt. Hope cemetery-has been mentioned in the preceding chapter. The West Shore rail- road, which is practically a branch of the Nev York Central, sends its trains into and out of that station, ag does the Northern Central, running tc Elmira. The Rochester & Lake Ontario railway was opened in 1883, a little later it became a branch of the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg and for some years past it has had its station on Lake avenue, its trains running up from Charlotte. The Lehigh Valley railroad got into the city in 1892, entering under the name of the Rochester & Hone- oye Valley railroad. Within the past year it has built a fine station on the south side of Court street bridge.
THE CARTHAGE ROAD.
The street-car system is usually considered a modern institution, but it had its forerunner here three quarters of a century ago. In January, 1833, a horse railroad, which had been constructed in the previous year by a small company consisting of Elisha Johnson, Josiah Bissell, Everard Peck and a few others, with a capital of $30,000, went into operation. Its object, as stated in its charter, was to connect the Erie canal with the head of ship navigation on the Genesee river, so the line started from the aqueduct, which it touched at the south end of Water street, then crossed Main street and continued north along the edge of the river bank, with a total descent of two hundred and fifty-four feet, till it reached Carthage, where it made di- reet connection with the gravity railroad men-
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
tioned in a preceding chapter. The coaches used for those excursions were open at the sides and were drawn by two horses, driven tandem, the driver being seated on the top of the car. The road was very popular at first, but the novelty soon wore off, after which it was operated for traffic more than for passengers, but even that became unremunerative, and the line was abandoned after ten years of service.
STREET RAILROADS.
Just twenty years after that was given up th? first line of the Rochester street railway system was opened, in July, 1863, on the Mt. Hope avenue ronte, from State street to the cemetery, and, sing- ularly enough, a part of that original line, the piece between the end of Sonth avenue and Clarissa street, was taken up shortly afterward and has never since been relaid. The West Main street branch, the Lake avenue line and the East Main. Alexander and Monroe streets routes were com- pleted in the same year, but after that there was a lull in the business, so that it was not till 1873 that the St. Paul street and Clinton street lines were opened, from which time additiong and ex- tensions were continually made. The cars to Charlotte, an independent concern, were first run by electricity on the 30th of July, 1889, and per- haps it was that which stimulated a syndicate of capitalists to buy out the old horse car company for 82,175,000 in November of that year and change the motive power from equine to electric. though the substitution was not completed till 1893.
TWO SMALL WARS.
A slight war scare-for it was nothing more as far as we were concerned-disturbed the peace of the community in 1837. A feeling of discontent on the Canadian side of the lake, against what some considered the encroachments of the British government, had been fanned into flame by the efforts, principally in the shape of editorial articles. of William Lyon Mackenzie, a restless demagogue who owned a small newspaper at the time. Some- thing like a miniature rebellion broke out, and, for some inexplicable reason, our people, who had nothing whatever in common with the insurgents, chose to work themselves into a sympathetic excite-
ment. Large sums of money were raised here, and a mob of persons from this vicinity rushed to the frontier and seized possession of Navy island, in the Niagara river, with the avowed purpose of using it as a base for the invasion of Canada. Thia insensate act would soon have produced a war be- tween the two countries had not General Scott been ordered to the island, who with a few troops cleared out the intruders at once. Mackenzie, the cause of the whole disturbance, escaped to New York and two years later worked his way up to Rochester, where he started a weekly paper called the Gazette, for the purpose of renewing the foolish struggle; being tried at Canandaigua for violation of the neutrality laws he was sentenced to imprisonment in our jail for eighteen months, but was pardoned within a year and disappeared. That was the final scene in what was sometimes styled the "Patriot war" but generally and more correctly called the "Navy island raid."
Abont ten years later a real war occurred, though we had not much to do with it. The troubles with Mexico having culminated in the invasion of that country in 1846, a full company was raised and enlisted here the next year, with Caleb Wilder as captain and Edward McGarry as first lientenant. There was no occasion for thera to do much fighting, but they remained in Mexico for eighteen months as part of the army of oc- cupation.
THE TELEGRAPH.
Rochester has the distinction of being, on the whole, the foremost city of the Union in the matter of the telegraph. The Morse system of telegraphy came into operation in 1844, but no one then dreamed that the wire would ever be carried across the Alleghany mountains, if indeed it ever reached as far as that. It was one of our citizens, the late Henry O'Reilly, who by his tireless energy project- ed, organized and constructed the longest range of connected linea in the world. These extended from the eastern seacoast to the distant South and were commonly known as the "O'Reilly lines," though their more formal title was the "Atlantic, Lake and Mississippi range." Most of them were constructed in 1846 and 1847, and, while they were connected, they were independent of each other, so that the business was unprofitable to many of them. Consolidation was the only way out of the
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difficulty, and that was effected by the persever- speculative investments as its predecessors. and ance of another Rochester man, the late Hiram the disasters of forty years ago have been repeated within very recent times. Sibley, who after years of strenuous effort succeej- ed in buying up, with the assistance of others, all those small lines and forming them into one whole, which later became that gigantic monopoly, the THE ROCHESTER KNOCKINGS. Western Union. The consolidation was practically perfected in 1860, and from that time for sixteen years he was the president of the company, the office and headquarters of which were in this city; under his management the line was built across the continent to the Pacific, while the number of telegraphic offices was increased from one hundred and thirty-two to over four thousand and the value of the property from $220,000 to $48,000,000.
The first telegraphic office here was not connect- ed with one of the O'Reilly lines, but with that of the New York, Albany & Buffalo company, which was merged in the Western Union in 1860. It was opened for messages in the winter of 1844-45, but the first press dispatch did not come here till June Ist, 1846, which appeared in the Democrat of the next day and was the report of the constitutional convention then in session at Albany. The of- fice was originally in the basement of Congress Hall but was soon removed to the Reynolds arcade, where it is still located : the first operator was George E. Allen, and the one who was in charge for the longest time was A. Cole Cheney, from 1852 to 1881, though his term of service has been almost equaled by the present incumbent, George D. Butler, who has held the position since 1883. As the Western Union lines extended, the stock, which was largely held in this city, increased in value and the local interest felt in the matter caused the price to advance far beyond its real worth ; the speculative excitement was felt by all classes, until the stock, after having been doubled and then watered to the extent of one third more, reached two hundred and thirty in April, 1864; that broke the market and the stock fell almost out of sight, to the ruin of many. Some of those who had a little money left were foolish enough to put it into the oil wells of Pennsylvania, where the petroleum fields were opened about that time. A few fortunes were made there, but the losses far exceeded the gains, and Rochester felt the effects for a long time. One might have supposed that those calamities would teach a profitable lessou but the present generation seems just as eager for
A singular phenomenon appeared here in 1847, which carried into foreign countries the name of our city by association in the title. In the year be- fore that John D. Fox lived with his family in Hydeville, Wayne county. The house which they occupied became the scene of mysterious noises, not loud at first but eventually so violent as to disturb the neighbors, and these manifestations were ti- nally traced to the instrumentality of the two little girls-Margaretta, aged twelve, and Kate, agel nine. Neither the parents nor any of the visitors were able to solve the mystery as to how these sounds, which had now taken the form of knock- ings or rappings on the walls, floors and ceilings of the dwelling, were produced. To prevent the possible collusion of the two children, they were separated, first one and then the other coming to Rochester to live with their older sister, Mrs. Leal Fish. As long as either remained at home the noises continued there ; when the last one had de- parted they ceased entirely. Mrs. Fish, originally skeptical, soon became as expert a medium as either of her little sisters, and the sounds soon came to be announced as messages from the depart- ed spirits in another world. Seances were given at the residence of the Fox family, who had by this time removed to Rochester, and in the houses of persons whose intelligent interest or morbid curi- osity impelled them to witness the manifestations, and in almost every instance the presence of any one of the three sisters was sufficient to obtain responses more or less satisfactory. The usual method was for some one in the group to call ont slowly the letters of the alphabet and when the right one was reached there would be a rap or knock of approval, by which laborious process the entire sentence would have to be spelled out.
The whole city became greatly excited. and while most people were incredulous many became pro- found believers in the truth of the alleged revela- tions. At Inst a public demonstration was given in Corinthian hall on November 9th, 1849, after which a committee of five citizens was agreed upon by those present to make a thorough investigation
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HISTORY OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY.
and report at a subsequent meeting. A few days later they reported that they had been unable to discover the means by which the noises were pro- duced. This did not satisfy the general expecta- tion; the people wanted exposure, and they must have it; so another committee was appointed, wit! the same result, and finally a third. All the fif- teen members of these different committees were men of the very highest standing in the com- munity, of unblemished character and all of them, without exception, absolute disbelievers in the new system. This last committee, determined to suc- ceed where the others had failed, made a more thorough investigation than their predecessor", subjecting the mediums to the most rigorous tests and having their clothing examined by trust- worthy women, selected for the purpose, to see if any artificial appliances were concealed. On the appointed evening Corinthian hall was crowded, but unfortunately the audience comprised a large number of lawless rowdies who went there for the purpose of creating a disturbance, and equal- ly unfortunately the mediums were present on the stage to hear what they felt confident would be their vindication. The committee reported that all their tests had been futile and that the rap- pings had been plainly audible when the girls were standing on feather pillows or on glass, without shoes, and when placed in other positions. A moment of stillness and then a mad rush for the platform. Blood would have been shed despite all the efforts of the police and the lives of the girls might have been sacrificed had it not been that S. W. D. Moore, then police justice and after- ward mayor of the city, a man of unusual size and strength, sprang forward and with his powerful arm beat back the foremost of the mob until their intended victims had been taken out by a baek door and conveyed to a place of safety. After that ontbreak the Fox sisters were allowed to pursue their activities without molestation and all the various phases of modern spiritnalism were event- ually evolved from the "Rochester knockings."
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM.
To many of the readers of this book African slavery in America is only historical, but to many others, although that system never existed in our midst, the recollections of its blighting influence
still remain. Perhaps in no other community of the North was there a more intense feeling of hos. tility to slavery and of indignation over the wrong- inflicted upon the negro. Colonel Rochester, the founder of the city, was the first emancipationist here, for, though he brought up ten slaves with him from Maryland in 1810, he freed them al. after reaching Dansville, as he would do nothing to perpetuate the institution even in its mildest form. At a later day Myron Holley, co-parent with De Witt Clinton of the Erie canal, was most active in that field of philanthropy. In 1839 he started the Rochester Freeman, in which he urged the policy of independent political action on the part of those opposed to slavery; in Sep- tember of that year the Monroe county convention, which was the first to be held for that purpose in the country, adopted an address and a series of resolutions prepared by Mr. Holley, who thereby became, more than any other one person, the founder of the Liberty party, for from this con- vention sprang that of the state, held in the suc- coeding January at Arcade, Wyoming county, and from that the national convention held in the fol- lowing April at Albany, which nominated James G. Birney for the presidency; after Mr. Holley's death, in 1841, the party acknowledged his sery- ices by putting up to his memory an imposing monument in Mt. Hope cemetery. From that time on, anti-slavery conventions frequently met here, and in the carly fifties many popular fairs were held in Corinthian hall, from the platform of which, on the 25th of October, 1858, William H. Seward uttered his memorable prediction about "the irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces."
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