On a cold, late October day in the year 1892, workers laying track from the north for the new Mohawk and Malone railroad met track layers coming from the south. They were at a place half a mile north of the Twitchell Creek bridge, not far from Big Moose Lake.
A young assistant engineer drove the last spike — or tried to — the first ten or twelve blows missed, much to the amusement of the railroad workers watching, any one of whom could have hit the spike on the first try. Local snowmobilers on their way to Old Forge and beyond cross that spot on their winter excursions. Work trains on their way to Saranac Lake to improve the prospective scenic corridor to Lake Placid will also cross that historic spot. It marks, of course, the first — and to this day the only — railroad to cross the Adirondacks. Dr. Seward Webb had done what few expected he could. He succeeded with unmatched genius and vigor to complete a railroad line from Herkimer to Malone in only eighteen months after the original survey was taken. At one time over 4,000 men were employed in its construction.
It is still today regarded as an achievement that is a milestone in American railroading.
My grandfather, William Simmons, whose family came to Syracuse, New York, by way of Dusseldorf in the Rhine River Valley in Germany in 1860, was an early engineer on that that railroad. When his work in 1900 began taking him over runs on the Adirondack Division he moved to this community in 1907. My grandmother, Mary Jane Flanagan, who came to this country as a young girl from County Mayo, Ireland, in 1884, often recalled how terrified she was during the first summer they moved here in 1908, when forest fires that destroyed 368,000 acres of Adirondack forest encircled Tupper Lake in a pall of smoke for weeks on end. The neighboring village of Long Lake West (Sabattis) about 14 miles south of Tupper Lake by rail was totally destroyed by a raging forest fire that fall. The estimated 100 town residents lost literally everything. Louis Simmons, my uncle, had noted that while Father never kept any documentation, it was known that he was the engineer of the rescue train that brought the residents out that fateful day. The road to Long Lake was completely cut off by the fire and adding to the danger was 85 cases (1,500 pounds) of dynamite owned by Moyenhan & Sons stored in a small building near the hotel. Also on the siding was a car of kerosene. “Fire was on both sides of the tracks, and the ties were burning, the smoke was suffocating, and the heat was unbearable,” according to Katherine Hammer, former Long Lake resident, describing her own escape in the train. (She had been working for the Brandeth & McAlpin families at Brandeth and had stayed over at the Wilderness Inn when located at Long Lake West before heading home to Long Lake.) The train, with its caboose starting to burn, was backed out by “Big Bill” down the track to Horseshoe. They had barely left when the dynamite exploded. The concussion was felt at Horseshoe (four miles away) and at Little Tupper (10 miles away).
On January 24, 1927, Bill Simmons was fatally injured while attempting to thaw out frozen pipes from a catwalk running along the boiler of a locomotive. According to Louie, “He could have just taken the train out of Tupper on a run to Utica, and the accident occurred in bitter, 40-below-zero cold near Childwold, seven miles south of this village. He sustained compound fractures of both legs and internal injuries and died a month later at Faxton Hospital in Utica.”
The railroad was to last for 73 years. Improved roads, modern automobiles, and fast-moving tractor trailers to carry freight all contributed to a steady decline as well as did the process of attrition, which continued for many years before the Public Service Commission gave the New York Central permission to end all service over the 142-mile Adirondack Division between Utica and Lake Placid. (In 1964 the railroad had lost its mail contract, which added $100,000 to its annual losses.) The 1964 report estimated its loss at $149,325 plus $41,200 in station costs. Thus, except for a brief time during the 1980 Olympics, the last passenger train on “Webbs Road” was in April 1965. The last freight train hauling five box cars to Saranac Lake and a couple of coal hoppers to Ray Brook passed over the tracks in August 1982. On that last freight run a washout prevented a return trip and the cars had to be ignobly hauled on flatbed trucks to Potsdam, where they were put back into service. In a March 11, 1989 issue, the Watertown Daily Times notes that “the private company that had run the 1980 recreational train continued to offer excursions into the Adirondacks but by August 1980 it had experienced its fifth derailment in two months, leading state officials to question seriously the safety of the line. Limited operations between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid resumed in September 1980, but the last run on the line was made in November 1980.” The Times article concluded that “eventually poor rail conditions contributed to the collapse in bankruptcy of the private company operating the Adirondack Railroad.”
This past week, I stopped to examine the huge diesel locomotive and its two vintage Canadian-made dump cars parked on a siding off the Junction’s main street, where the rail line crossed the outlet of Little Wolf Creek before it empties into Raquette Pond. I climbed (feebly) down to the large cement ledge that projects from the wall of the well-made bridge that supports the rails and ties. Dozens of large suckers (called Carpe Blanche by early settlers who would put one fish in each hill of potatoes they planted — they were not considered a food fish) covered the stream bottom. They were in spawning posture, the males at this time of year displaying a faint rosy stripe along the middle of their sides, noses pointed upstream against the current, which at this time of year was in flood stage.
I wondered if suckers were under that bridge when in 1892 as many as 27 work trains of 30 cars each rumbled over on the way to where 500 workers were working furiously in the section near the Saranac Inn fish hatchery, working toward the section crews coming north from Tupper, ballasting the track, filling trestles, widening banks, and laying ties. Of course that was at a time when you could catch scores of 2-pound trout in the outlet rapids between Big Wolf and Little Wolf.
Today those trout are gone just as the gigantic 100,000-gallon water tower, the two huge bunker oil towers that fueled the steam engine, and the beautiful railroad station are gone. The vibrancy that marked that place is also gone. I would like to think suckers were spawning at that spot at that time as proof that not everything has changed even as I agree that change is inevitable and often necessary.
That same morning I ran into Gerald Black, who lives in Piercefield. Early that morning he had heard the train whistle coming across the Raquette River flow near his home. “Boy, was that a great sound,” he told me. “I hope the D.O.T. and that other outfit can get the line restored so that trains will move trough here once more.” A lot of people agree with Gerald.
I like what railroad buff and author Henry Harter had to say in his book, “Fairy Tail Railroad”: “So we can say for the M&M and the St. Lawrence and Adirondack Railway, together the Adirondack Division on the New York Central they came, they struggled, and they stayed to help develop, for all people, the use of the Forest Preserve. When the time comes, they receded into the wilderness to be born again if and when needed.”
Let’s hope Gerald can again hear that whistle each morning. A clarion call to remind us of a proud past when this village was the brightest star in the constellation of stations that made up the old M&M.