The first Pierrepont was not a particularly successful craft and it was supplemented in 1864 by the Watertown, which gradually took the brunt of the steadily increasing traffic across the St. Lawrence at this point. The ferry grew steadily to huge proportions and for many years a great volume of both passengers and freight was handled upon it. It is a fact worth noting here, perhaps, that the first through shipment of silk from the Orient over the newly completed transcontinental route of the Canadian Pacific Railway was made into New York, by way of the Cape Vincent ferry and the R. W. & O. in the late fall of 1883.
With the business of this international crossing steadily increasing, it became necessary to keep two efficient steamers upon the route and so the second Pierrepont was builded, going into service in 1874. At about that time the Watertown ceased her active days upon the river and the lake and was succeeded by the staunch steamer Maud. Here was a staunch craft indeed, built upon the Clyde somewhere in the late fifties or the early sixties, and shipped in sections from Glasgow to Montreal, where she was set up for St. Lawrence service, in which she still is engaged, under the name of the America. Her engines for many years were of a peculiar Scotch pattern, by no means usual in this part of the world, and apparently understood by no one other than Billy Derry, for many years her engineer. Occasionally Derry would quarrel with the owners of the Maud and quit his job. They always sent their apologies after him, however. No one else could run the boat, and they were faced with the alternative of bowing to his whims or laying up the steamer.
Yet, as I have already intimated, the passenger traffic was but a small part of Cape Vincent’s importance through three or four great decades. The ferry carried mail, freight and express as well—the place was ever an important ferry crossing, a seat of a custom house of the first rank. In summer the steamer acted as ferry, for many years crossing the Wolfe Island barrier four times daily, through three or four miles of canal, which some time along in the early nineties was suffered to fill up and was abandoned in 1892. In midwinter mail and freight and passengers alike crossed in speed and a real degree of fine comfort in great four-horse sleighs upon a hard roadway of thick, thick ice. It was between seasons, when the ice was either forming or breaking and sleighs as utter an impossibility as steamboats that the real problem arose. In those times of the year a strange craft, which was neither sled nor boat, but a combination of both, was used. It went through the water and over the ice. Yet the result was not as easy as it sounds. More than one passenger paid his dollar to go from Cape Vincent to Kingston, for the privilege of pushing the heavy hand sled-boat over the ice, getting his feet wet in the bargain.
Into the many vagaries of North Country weather, I shall not enter at this time. In a later chapter we shall give some brief attention to them. It is enough here to say that a man who could fight a blizzard, coming in from off Ontario, and keep the line open could run a railroad anywhere else in the world. In after years I was to see, myself, some of these rare old fights; Russell plows getting into the drifts over their necks around-about Pulaski and Richland and Sandy Creek, seemingly half the motive power off the track. Yet these were no more than the road has had since almost the very day of its inception.
Once, in the midwinter of 1873, we had a noble old wind—the North Country has a way of having noble old winds, even to-day—and the huge spire of the First Presbyterian Church in Washington Street, Watertown, came tumbling down into the road, smashed into a thousand bits, and seemingly with no more noise than the sharp slamming of a blind.
That night—it was the evening of the fifteenth of January—the railroad in and about Watertown nearly collapsed. Trains were hugely delayed and many of them abandoned. The Watertown Times of the next day, naÏvely announced:
“Conductor Sandiforth didn’t come home last night and missed a good deal by not coming. He spent the evening with a party of shovelers working his way from Richland to Pierrepont Manor. Conductor Aiken followed him up with the night train but he couldn’t pass him, and so both trains arrived here at 9:30 this (Thursday) morning.”
Here Conductor Lew Sandiforth first comes into our picture and for a moment I shall interrupt my narrative to give a bit of attention to him. He is well worth the interruption of any narrative. We had many pretty well-known conductors on the old R. W. & O.—but none half so well-known as Lew Sandiforth. He was the wit of the old line, and its pet beau. It was said of him, that if there was a good looking woman on the afternoon train up to Watertown, Lew would quit taking tickets somewhere north of Sandy Creek. The train then could go to the Old Harry for all he cared. He had his social duties to perform. He was not one to shirk such responsibilities.