Most folk shook their heads negatively at that suggestion. Watertown had been burned once in a railroad experience. It now emulated the traditional wise child. “Buy the stock,” whispered Britton to a Watertown manufacturer. It then was at twenty-five. The Watertownian demurred. A year later it was forty. “Buy it now,” Britton still whispered to him. And still our cautious soul of the North Country hesitated. It touched fifty. Britton still urged. Of course, the Watertown man would not buy it then. He prided himself that he never bought anything at the top of the market. Sixty, seventy, then R. W. & O. in the great market of Wall Street touched seventy-five.
“How about it now?” said Britton over the wire.
The Watertown man laughed. He had made a mistake—one of the few financial errors that he ever made—and he could afford to laugh at this one. Buy R. W. & O. at seventy-five? Not he. Let the other man do it. Afterwards he did not laugh as hard. He lived long enough to see R. W. & O. reach par once again—and then cross it and keep upwards all the while. He saw it reach 105, then 110 and then on a certain memorable March day in 1891, 123.
But this anticipates. We are riding too rapidly with our narrative. If old “Jud” Remington were traveling with us upon this special he would do, as sometimes was his wont, reach up and pull the bell-cord to slow the train. He took no risks, did “Jud”—bless his fine, old heart.
We have anticipated—and perhaps we have neglected. All these years, of which we have been writing, the R. W. & O. had a competitor—a very live competitor, we must have you understand. So live, that to gain a permanent position for itself, that competitor must needs be completely eliminated. To that competitor—the Utica & Black River Railroad—we must now turn our attention.
CHAPTER VIII
THE UTICA & BLACK RIVER
The beginnings of the Utica & Black River Railroad go away back to 1852—the year of the real completion and opening of the Watertown & Rome. The fact that not only could that line be built successfully, but that there would come to it immediately a fine flow of traffic was not without its effect upon the staunch old city of Utica, which had felt rather bitterly about the loss, to its smaller neighbor, Rome, of the prestige of being the gateway city to the North Country. From the beginning Utica had been that gateway. Long ago we read of the fine records that were made on the old post-road from Utica through Martinsburgh and Watertown to Sackett’s Harbor. The Black River valley was the logical pathway to the Northern Tier. The people who dwelt there felt that God had made it so. And now the infamy had come to pass that a new man-built highway had ignored it completely; had passed far to the west of it.