CHAPTER XXII

THE COMING OF THE RAILROAD TO LAKE ERIE

Lake Erie became in the nineteenth century the portal of the Great Lakes. To her shores came from the east an army of immigrants pouring into the states beyond, and from these regions, as they became populated, came back an immense volume of produce to be carried to the cities of the east and the south. These conditions led the citizens of the lake shore promptly to adopt any new means of transportation. In its day they had welcomed the turnpike and built many roads into the interior. During the era of canal-building the people of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on artificial waterways. In 1840 five canals over a thousand miles in length, not including their many branches, opened into Lake Erie. The Welland Canal united it with Lake Ontario, the Erie with the Hudson, while the Ohio and Erie connected Cleveland with Columbus and the Ohio and also with the Pennsylvania Canal and thus with Pittsburg; and from Toledo and the Maumee River the Miami Canal went south to Cincinnati, and the Wabash and Erie west to Lafayette, Indiana. This remarkable group of canals had been built in twenty years. No less wonderful was the building of railroad lines in the next two decades; and to us who are accustomed to limited trains and “flyers” the story of the first trains is one of curious interest.

[Illustration: Map: “By Canal and Railroad to Lake Erie” showing connecting canal and railroad paths from Lake Michigan in the west to Lake Ontario and New York in the east]

Ohio and Michigan were progressive in the matter of building railroads. Michigan gave a charter to the Michigan Central in 1830, and in 1832, when there were only two hundred and twenty-nine miles of railroad in operation in the United States, the Ohio legislature granted a charter for the construction of a road from Sandusky to Dayton, a distance of over one hundred and fifty miles. These early dates are rather an exhibition of good intentions and foresight than a measure of actual achievement, for neither road was begun until 1837 and then each was carried but a few miles. All railroad-building about the lakes until nearly the middle of the century was a matter of crude and small beginnings, but it is these very beginnings which make us realize the transformations that have taken place within less than eighty years.

The first railroad to be built in Ohio was the Kalamazoo and Erie from Toledo, Ohio, to Adrian, Michigan. This was later bought up by the Michigan Southern road and was the first link in the route to Chicago, taken, as will be remembered, by our traveller of 1840. It was thirty-three miles long and was a typical early railroad. Seven-eighths of it was built in unbroken forest, and one-third through a densely timbered swamp where malaria and mosquitoes made the lives of the workmen miserable. The track was built of oak stringers, or long wooden beams, upon which were fastened strips of iron five-eighths of an inch thick and two and a half inches wide. These rails were supported by wooden cross-ties placed about four feet apart and resting securely on a heavy foundation of broken stone. The cars were built after the fashion of the body of a stage-coach, or rather of three stage-coaches put together, and were set on a four-wheeled truck instead of directly on wheels, to make it possible for them to swing round on curves. The conductor walked along an outside footboard to collect fares. These cars opened at either end and seated about twenty-four persons, who faced to the front. On the Toledo road a horse track was laid between the rails, and the road was used for one year with horse power. In 1837 a locomotive was purchased and steam power was substituted.

For ten years American builders had been experimenting with types of locomotives and had adopted a pattern which has persisted to this day in its principles, although it has been much changed in details and size. The fore part of the engine was placed on a four-wheeled truck and fastened to it with a bolt, which allowed the truck to swing some distance and thus to round sharp curves safely. The back part rested on four connected driving wheels. An engine of this type had been built in 1836 in Philadelphia, and was speedily adopted elsewhere. It weighed about ten tons when water and coal tanks were loaded, and would seem to us to-day a crude and small affair, but it was better suited to wooden rails than a heavier engine would have been. Passengers paid four and a half cents a mile to be carried on this Toledo railroad at a speed of less than ten miles an hour.

The leisureliness and timidity of the first trains would seem to us amazing, did we not remember how tiny the engine was, how unstable the road-bed, and how loosely the cars were coupled together by bolt and pin. Twenty years after this first road was built one of the printed instructions to engineers was to be perfectly sure before they pulled out of the station that they had their entire train with them and had dropped no cars in starting. At first it was the custom for the engineer to stop the train to collect fares, or for any other urgent business connected with the road. It was many years before the companies dared run night trains. The Michigan Central, which was opened in 1837, found in the autumn of 1841 that its depots were so loaded with barrels of flour and cords of wood that they would not be able to get it all to Detroit before the close of navigation on the lakes. The directors conferred together and hired teams to transport the goods from stations near Detroit to that place. For the long distances they had no alternative but to put one of their four locomotives on for night service, but they considered it unsafe and hoped that such extreme measures would not be necessary in the future. When this road had been opened, four years before, an adventurous young man who owned a sorrel pony announced that he was going to race the train for the last mile before it reached Dearborn. The crowds who had been assembled to see the first train come in were much excited over the competition, and, needless to say, the pony won.

After the completion of these and other short roads there was a lull in railroad-building, due to the hard times in the western country which succeeded the panic of 1837. In 1845 and 1846 the legislatures began once more to plan internal improvements, and a great era of railroad-building began which continued until the opening of the Civil War. In the history of Lake Erie 1851 stands out as the year when three of the trunk lines were completed and their opening fittingly celebrated. In that year the first train came into Cleveland, and with the thought of the hundreds of trains that enter its stations daily, let us put ourselves back into the city of 1851 and watch the first train arrive.

The state legislature had voted to loan to the credit of the city $200,000 for the construction of the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railroad. In 1851 the road-bed of two hundred and sixty-three miles was completed, and on the morning of February 21 was formally opened by the passage over the road of a party of four hundred and twenty-eight persons, who took the train from Columbus and Cincinnati to Cleveland, the “city of the Lake Shore.” The party was made up of members of the legislature, officers of the state, the councils of both cities, and many citizens. The road over which these people travelled was a very different one from the Toledo road of fourteen years before, and from the number of people accommodated it is evident that the passenger coaches were very different, also. Iron rails had taken the place of wooden ones, and heavier locomotives and more comfortable cars had been built. When the excursion train reached the city of Cleveland, thousands of citizens were lined up along the track and about the station and the cannon of the city boomed out a loud welcome to the incoming guests. The party had arrived late in the day, as it was a twelve-hour journey. The next morning a procession of Cleveland people was formed, with General Sanford as chief marshal, to escort the guests to the public square in front of the court-house, where the mayor received them with a speech of welcome. He was followed by Mr. Convers, speaker of the senate, Mr. Starkweather, who spoke for the people of Cleveland, three gentlemen from Cincinnati, and the governor of the state, Mr. Wood, who was a Cleveland resident. Last on the programme came Mr. Cyrus Prentiss, the president of the Cleveland and Pittsburg Railroad, forty miles of which were also opened that day. This road ran to Ravenna, where passengers could take the canal packet to Beaver River, and there transfer to a steamboat for Pittsburg. Mr. Prentiss invited the guests to take an excursion on that road. After that trip they returned to a banquet and grand torchlight procession in the evening.

In their pulpits on Sunday the ministers discoursed on the wonderful event that had taken place, the arrival of the railroad, and on Monday morning the people gathered from all the region round to see the strange iron horse start back across the state with its load. Just before the train pulled out of the station, one of the visiting party sang a humorous song, describing the effect of the trip upon the interior regions of the state. He told of the delight and astonishment of mothers and children in their log cabins, and of wood-choppers of the back country as they had looked up and seen this “snorting iron horse with the long tail” race through the country. He ended his song with praise of the governor Cleveland had given the state and of Cleveland itself,

“The beautiful city, the forest-tree city, The city upon the lake shore.”

The opening up of the Venango oil-district in Pennsylvania in 1858 brought to Cleveland a large refining and shipping industry, for which it was well fitted by its advantageous position on the lake and its railroads and vessels.

Two months later a similar occasion took place in the little village of Dunkirk, Pennsylvania, when the New York and Erie road was completed. This line crossed the state of New York some seventy miles south of the Albany turnpike and New York Central route, and with its completion the Great Lakes and the Atlantic were once more united and the occasion was celebrated as if such an idea had never entered the minds of any one before. President Fillmore and Daniel Webster, his Secretary of State, with three other members of the cabinet, came on from Washington and took the trip on the first train over the road. In New York City and all along the way there was great excitement, and in the little village of Dunkirk grand preparations had been going on for weeks. The train arrived at four-thirty on the afternoon of May 15. As it rolled into the station the church bells rang, cannon roared, and a salute of thirteen guns was fired from the United States steamship _Michigan_, which was stationed in the harbor. The cars passed under a canopy of French, American, and British flags, and beyond the engine at the very end of the track was an arch of evergreen and flowers built over an old plough on which was printed the word “Finis.” This was the plough used to break ground for the first ten-mile section of the road at Dunkirk in 1838.

The distinguished visitors formed in a procession and marched about the town, to be welcomed by the mayor before they entered the huge shed erected for the occasion. Over the table, three hundred feet long, hung two barbecued oxen suspended on poles. Upon the table were ten sheep roasted whole. Bread had been baked in loaves ten feet long by two thick, which it took two men to carry. Even the pork and beans were in tin vessels holding fifty gallons each, and barrels of cider were set at intervals along the side of the table. The presidential party looked, admired, and praised--and then returned to the hotel for a collation, leaving the sampling of these triumphs of the culinary art to the other guests of the occasion.

From the window of the hotel the great men made speeches in the evening, President Fillmore and Senator Douglas leading and being followed by ex-Governor Seward and others. This group was of great interest to the political world as having six presidential candidates in its ranks--Fillmore, Crittenden, Douglas, Seward, Marcy, and Webster. The last-named was to have spoken that night, but he was so hoarse from previous efforts that he could only say a few words in answer to the calls of the people for him, and postponed his speech until the next night. With suitable éclat, the ocean and the lakes were once more “forever united,” this time in very truth, by a service which took only twenty hours in contrast to the three days of the Erie Canal. In the words of one of the banners in the hall, “’Tis done,--’tis done, the mighty chain that binds bright Erie to the main.”

“Bright Erie” was not yet connected as closely as the public might naturally demand, as was shown by the famous Erie war of 1853. On all the roads between what are to-day the great cities of the country there ran one or at most two trains a day. Even on the New York and Erie itself, which was one of the fastest and best equipped in the matter of service, the mail train ran one-half the distance in one day, and then stopped overnight at Elmira before it proceeded on its way. These arrangements made it very necessary that the traveller should make good connections and that the various roads should run in harmony, for each piece was operated by a separate company. Besides this there was another complication. The tracks of different roads were of different gauges or widths, so that the train of one could not by any possibility be run on another. This condition of affairs was particularly bad at Erie, twenty miles beyond Dunkirk, where all passengers had to leave the cars, ride across the town in omnibuses, or walk a mile to the other station, and if connections failed, as they often did, dine or even stay overnight in the town. This state of affairs was satisfactory to the local hotel and baggage men and others who gained from the opportunities offered by a large transfer of baggage and people, but it was very annoying to travellers. The railroad manager of the eastern road decided to alter the gauge of his road and attempt an arrangement by which passengers could be carried through direct to Cleveland. He began by buying up all the stock he could of the other line. This was the pioneer attempt at a railroad merger and resulted in one of the most bitter local wars the country has ever known, involving every one in the region and the people of both states in a protracted and very serious struggle. The issue was complicated and intensified by state and railroad rivalry, but the whole affair began because the people of Erie were unwilling to be made a “way-station,” as they termed it, on a through route and thus lose the commercial advantages of being a terminus for railroads and steamboat lines.

On the morning of December 7, 1853, the citizens of Erie were summoned by the ringing of the court-house bell. Men rushed to the centre of the town to find that the eastern railroad company had begun work at the state line altering their road from their four-feet-ten-inches gauge to the six-foot width of the western railway. As the road ran for a short distance through the street of the town the municipal authorities had refused a permit for change, but the company had begun, nevertheless. After listening to impassioned speechmaking from the court-house steps till it was thoroughly roused, the crowd, led by the mayor, started for the wooden railroad bridge. They found it guarded by employees of the railroad, who were soon scattered by a shower of rotten eggs and other missiles. The mob then attacked the bridge, tore up the tracks and the timber, and returned triumphantly to the city. Two days later a similar mob tore up the track, destroyed the bridge, and ploughed the road at Harbor Creek, seven miles east of Erie. Mob-rule had come in earnest.

It was two months before a single train got through to any point near these places, and it was three years before the matter was finally adjusted. The courts and the state militia became involved. State feeling ran high between Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York over the question of their local gauges, and the press of the whole country took sides in the matter. Passengers and freight had to be transferred during the winter months, when the lake was closed, by wagon from the stop east of Erie to the stop west of that town, a process that was called “Crossing the Isthmus.” But still the Erie people rallied with the watchword, “Break gauge at Erie, or have no railroad.”

Horace Greeley, going west at this time, had to ride the seven miles across the “Isthmus” in an open sleigh through a severe storm of wind, snow, and sleet, and after that the railroad managers and the townspeople were continually denounced in the _New York Tribune_. “Let Erie be avoided by all travellers,” he wrote on his return, “until grass shall grow in her streets, and till her piemen in despair shall move away to some other city.”

Homes of railroad officers and sympathizers were mobbed by the “Rippers,” as the opponents of the road were called because of their violent methods. The bridge at Harbor Creek was rebuilt by the company four times, only to have it burned or torn down. At last when the whole town was split into bitter factions and all united local spirit was for the time being destroyed, the courts and legislature settled the matter. The railroad company, having made certain concessions to Erie interests, was allowed to change to a compromise gauge of four feet eight and a half inches (that of the New York Central road) and run trains through Erie on what is now a part of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. The great era of consolidation which was to create our transcontinental lines had begun.