Watertown, New York

“ WATERTOWN, a township of Middlesex county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., on the Charles river, about 6 m. W. of Boston. Pop. (1890) 7073; (1900) 9706, of whom 2885 were foreign-born and 53 were negroes; (1910 census) 12,875. Area, 4.1 sq. m. Watertown is served by the Fitchburg division of the Boston & Maine railway, and is connected with Boston, Cambridge, Newton (immediately adjacent and served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway) and neighbouring towns by electric railways. It is a residential and manufacturing suburb of Boston. ”

“ Prosperity already was upon the North Country. It was laying the foundations of its future wealth. It was ordained that a railroad should be given it. The problem was just how and where that railroad should be built. After a brief but bitter fight between Rome and Utica for the honor of being the chief terminal of this railroad up into the North Country, Rome was chosen; as far back as 1832. Yet it was not until sixteen years later that the construction of the Watertown & Rome Railroad, the pioneer road of Northern New York, was actually begun. ”

“ It seems that Sackett’s Harbor had decided that it was not going to permit itself to be outdone in this railroad business by Cape Vincent. If the Harbor could not realize its dream of a railroad to Saratoga it might at least build one to the new Watertown & Rome road there at Pierrepont Manor, and so gain for itself a direct route to both New York and Boston. And as a fairly immediate extension, a line on to Pulaski, which might eventually reach Syracuse, was suggested. ”

“ In May, 1891, he was transferred to Watertown as chief train despatcher and later as train master. His stepping upward has been continuous and earned. To-day as Vice-President, in charge of operation, of the entire New York Central system he is recognized as one of the king-pins of railroad operators of all creation and is the same simple and unassuming gentleman that one found him in the old days at Oswego and Watertown.
That seems to be the mark of the real railroader, always. Ostentation does not get a man very far in the game. ”

“ The financial end of the transaction was apt always to be the most difficult part of it. Yet somehow these were almost always solved. The Watertown & Rome road guaranteed some of the bonds of the Potsdam & Watertown and Erastus Corning, of Albany, and John H. Wolfe, of New York, loaned it considerable sums of money. Construction proceeded, and on May 4, 1854, the Directors decided to send 650 tons of the new iron to the easterly terminus of the road; the remainder to the westerly building forces. ”

“ After Russell, Dewitt C. Moon; a man with an unusual genius for placating labor and getting the very best results out of it. Mr. Moon succeeded Mr. Russell as Superintendent at Watertown, April 1, 1899, leaving that post September 1, 1902, to become General Manager of the Lake Erie & Western, a Vanderbilt property of the mid-West. He had been schooled in that family of railroads, starting in as telegraph operator on the old Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley & Pittsburgh, which was gradually merged, first into the Lake Shore and then into the parent reorganized New York Central of to-day. ”

“ Showing the First Passenger Station of the Potsdam & Watertown.
Taken from the Woodruff House Tower.
But Watertown’s chief comfort was in its passenger station, which stood in the rear of the well-famed Woodruff House. Norris M. Woodruff had completed his hotel at about the same time that the railroad first reached Watertown. It was a huge structure—reputed to be at that time the largest hotel in the United States west of New York City; and even the far-famed Astor House of that metropolis, had no dining-salon which in height and beauty quite equalled the dining-room of the Woodruff House. Mr. ”

“ Moreover, he was requested to notify the conductors not to pass any persons without a pass except the Directors and Secretary of the company, and their families, the roadmaster, paymaster, station agents, and “persons who the conductors think are entitled to charity.”
Despite obstacles to its full earning power such as this, the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburgh prospered ... and progressed. Forever it was planning new frills to add to its operation. In [Pg 118] 1865 it had placed a through Wagner sleeping-car in service between Watertown and New York. ”

“ The Dutch villages had their assemblies, which under the English rule were developed into town-meetings, though with less ample powers than those of New England. ... The New York system is of especial interest, because it has powerfully influenced the development of local institutions throughout the Northwest." J. Fiske, Civil Government in the United States, chapters 2 and 4. "The name town first occurs in the record of the second colonial meeting of the Court of Assistants [Massachusetts Bay, September 7, 1630] , in connection with the naming of Boston, Charlestown and Watertown. ... ”

“ Oh, you have no idea what a city Waterville has become. The great waterpower has been effectually harnessed, the streets are paved; electric car lines, planing mills, and scores of other manufacturing concerns are in full operation. Our population is now 246numbered by thousands, instead of hundreds, while busy activity and prosperity are apparent on every hand.”
“You quite astonish me, old fellow,” replied Vance, “indeed you do; but I needed no greater proof of Waterville’s prosperity than your report of the sale of lots belonging to my New York friends. ”

“ THE JUMEL MANSION
Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence, yet of caprice, beauty, ambition, impropriety, common sense and eccentricity—yes, a woman. ”

“ Waterton's enthusiasm with regard to the American women, it is difficult for the most casual observer not to be struck with their appearance; nor do I know any part of the world (not even excepting England) where the display of female beauty is more striking than at New York, and Philadelphia, where, from the warmth of the climate, the light dress of the South of Europe is seen in conjunction with the freshness, and bright colouring of a Northern complexion. ”

“ Today more than ninety-nine per cent. of the population of the immensely populated island of Manhattan lives north of the City Hall. That cheap north wall, hidden under countless coats of white paint, is the one acute reminder of the days that were when the Hall was new—when the gentle square in which it stood was surrounded by the suburban residences of prosperous New Yorkers and when the waters of the Collect Pond—where the New York boys use to skate in the bitterness of old-fashioned winters—lapped its northerly edge. ”

“ New York, Waterville said to himself with a glow of civic pride, was quite capable of taking a higher stand in such a matter than London. They went some distance without speaking; at last he said, expressing honestly the thought at that moment uppermost in his mind: “I hate that phrase, ‘getting into society.’ I don’t think one ought to attribute to one’s self that sort of ambition. One ought to assume that one’s in the confounded thing—that one is society—and to hold that if one has good manners one has, from the social point of view, achieved the great thing. ”

“ Waterford is served by the Delaware & Hudson railway, and is at the junction of the Erie and the Champlain divisions of the great barge canal connecting Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. There was a settlement here probably as early as 1630, and Waterford was laid out in 1784, and was incorporated as a village in 1794. ”

“ Headway?" Waterville was quite in the dark.
She would n't answer at once; her eyes, glittering a little, were fixed upon absent images. "What did you hear about me over there? Don't pretend you heard nothing."
He had heard nothing at all; there had not been a word about Mrs. Headway in New York. He could n't pretend, and he was obliged to tell her this. "But I have been away," he added, "and in America I did n't go out. There 's nothing to go out for in New York—only little boys and girls."
"There are plenty of old women! ”

“ If the Manhattan towns, or Manhattan, as we shall not scruple to term the several places that compose the prosperous sisterhood at the mouth of the Hudson—a name that is more ancient and better adapted to the history, associations, and convenience of the place than any other—continue to prosper as they have done, ere the close of the present century they will take their station among the capitals of the first rank. ”

“ The road leads up over a sort of plateau; a wide expanse of country can be viewed in all directions, but there are only more fields to see, more farm-houses and squatty barns, perhaps a village church steeple in the distance, a village that has its oldest inhabitant and a church with a church-yard. Away off to the north, across a gleaming strip of water, which the map shows to be Long Island Sound, lie the blue hills of the Bronx. They, too, are well within Greater New York. So is all that country to the southwest, far beyond the range of the eye, Jamaica, and Jamaica Bay and Coney Island. ”

“ In fifty years they have crept up from the Fourth Ward slums and the Five Points the whole length of the island, and have polluted the Annexed District to the Westchester line. Crowding all the lower wards, wherever business leaves a foot of ground unclaimed; strung along both rivers, like ball and chain tied to the foot of every street, and filling up Harlem with their restless, pent-up multitudes, they hold within their clutch the wealth and business of New York, hold them at their mercy in the day of mob-rule and wrath. ”

“ Spring, whose coming the breeze had heralded to Wally as he smoked upon the roof, floated graciously upon New York two mornings later. The city awoke to a day of blue and gold and to a sense of hard times over and good times to come. In a million homes, a million young men thought of sunny afternoons at the Polo Grounds; a million young women of long summer Sundays by the crowded waves of Coney Island. ”

“ Have you seen it, too, down Madison Avenue in the mysterious twilight hour of blue and gold when all New York is beautiful? The street lamps have come on; the dark figures of home-going pedestrians hurry past you; there are lamps in the windows of houses. A filmy blue veil of twilight obscures the distances, so that they are soft, alluring. The tower is pale, almost ethereal, at the end of the vista. Its great clock, pricked out with golden lamps, seems scarce a third of the way up its side. The white walls rise on, and on, with here and there a spot of gold, and taper into nothing. ”

“ Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end—a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence. ”

“ In thirty-five years the city of less than a hundred thousand came to harbor half a million souls, for whom homes had to be found. Within the memory of men not yet in their prime, Washington had moved from his house on Cherry Hill as too far out of town to be easily reached. ”

“ But civilization begins at home, said Waterville; and the incident threw an ironical light upon her desire to get into society. It failed, however, to divert her thoughts from the subject she was discussing with Waterville, for as Max ascended the box and the carriage went on its way, she threw out another little note of defiance. "If once I 'm all right over here, I can snap my fingers at New York! You 'll see the faces those women will make." ”

“ The sea of a mighty population, held in galling fetters, heaves uneasily in the tenements. Once already our city, to which have come the duties and responsibilities of metropolitan greatness before it was able to fairly measure its task, has felt the swell of its resistless flood. If it rise once more, no human power may avail to check it. The gap between the classes in which it surges, unseen, unsuspected by the thoughtless, is widening day by day. ”

“ To the nonresident New York City seems a hopeless confusion. The mountain-like ridges of skyscrapers at the lower end of Manhattan dominate a scene that has not its match for impressiveness of wealth, power and human achievement anywhere in the modern or the ancient world. Its tangle of waterways is arched high with bridges, tunnelled under with subways, swarming with shipping and woven by flying shuttles of ferry-boats. ”

“ Upon Manhattan Island, the city's push "uptown"-ward has been like the cut of a drawing knife, a remorseless process of levelling and "filling-in." Forty times in population and twenty in area has it expanded beyond the growth of 1776. ”

“ If this fashion of acquiring greatness continues, being inclusion rather than expansion, there need be no limit to the ciphers periodically tacked on to the population of the world’s swarming hives. Now that New York is growing, it might drop its insignificant borrowed name and assume its rightful one of dignity and historic import, Manhattan. It fills the twenty-two square miles between Harlem river, the Hudson, the East River, and the bay, which area is Manhattan Island. ”