For some weeks the line halted there at Adams. A citizen of Watertown wrote in his diary in August of that year that he had had a fearful time getting home from New York “... The cars only ran to Adams, and I had to have my horse sent down there from Watertown. I had a hard time for a young man....” he complains naïvely.
The railroad was, however, opened to Watertown, its headquarters, its chief town, and the inspiration that had brought it into being, on the evening of September 5, 1851. At eleven o’clock that evening, up to the front of the passenger station, then located near the foot of Stone Street, the first locomotive came into Watertown. I am not at all sure which one of the road’s small fleet it was. It had started building operations with four tiny second-hand locomotives which it had garnered chiefly from New England—the Lion, the Roxbury, the Commodore and the Chicopee. Of these the Lion was probably the oldest, certainly the smallest. It had been builded by none other than the redoubtable George Stephenson, himself, in England, some ten or fifteen years before it first came into Northern New York. It was an eight-wheeled engine, of but fourteen tons in weight. So very small was it in fact that it was of very little practical use, that Louis L. Grant, of Rome, who was one of the road’s first repair-shop foreman, finally took off the light side-rods between the drivers—the Lion was inside connected, after the inevitable British fashion, and had a V-hook gear and a variable cut-off—and gained an appreciable tractive power for the little engine.
But, at the best, she was hardly a practical locomotive, even for 1851. And soon after the completion of the road to Cape Vincent she was relegated to the round-house there and stored against an emergency. That emergency came three or four years after the opening of the line. A horseman had ridden in great haste to the Cape from Rosiere—then known as LaBranche’s Crossing—with news of possible disaster.
“The wood-pile’s all afire at the Crossing,” he shouted. “Ef the road is a goin’ to have any fuel this winter you’d better be hustling down there.”
Richard Starsmeare was on duty at the round-house. He hurriedly summoned the renowned Casey Eldredge, then and for many years afterwards a famed engineer of the Rome road and Peter Runk, the extra fireman there. Together they got out the little Lion and made her fast to a flat-car upon which had been put four or five barrels filled with water to extinguish the conflagration. It would have been a serious matter indeed to the road to have had that wood-pile destroyed. It was one of the chief sources of fuel supply of the new railroad. The Lion, with its tiny fire-fighting crew, went post-haste to LaBranche’s. But when it had arrived the farmers roundabout already had managed to extinguish the flames.... Casey Eldredge reached for his watch.
“Gee,” said he, “we shall have to be getting out of this. The Steamboat Express will be upon our heels. Peter, get the fire up again.”
Peter got the fire up. He opened the old fire-box door and thrust an armful of pine into it. The blaze started up with a roar. And then the men who were on the engine found themselves lying on their backs on the grass beside the railroad....
They plowed the Lion out of the fields around LaBranche’s for the next two years. Her safety-valve was turned out of the ground by a farmer’s boy a good two miles from the railroad. Starsmeare got it and carried it in his tool-box for years thereafter—he quickly rose to the post of engineer and in the days of the Civil War ran a locomotive upon the United States Military Railroad from Washington south through Alexandria to Orange Court House.
So perished the Lion. The little Roxbury’s fate was more prosaic. With the flanges upon her driving-wheels ground down and her frame set upon brick piers she became the first powerhouse of the Rome shops. The Commodore and the Chicopee were larger engines. With their names changed they entered the road’s permanent engine fleet.