In 1857, the Black River & Utica Railroad was operating a single passenger train a day, between Utica and Boonville. It left Boonville at eight o’clock in the morning and arrived at Utica at 10:20 a. m. The return run left Utica at 4:00 p. m. and arrived at Boonville at 6:20 p. m. Seventy-five cents was charged to ride from Utica to Trenton and $1.25 from Utica to Boonville. The little road then had four locomotives, the T. S. Faxton, the J. Butterfield, the Boonville and the D. C. Jenney. The Faxton hauled the passenger train, and a young man from Boonville, who also owned a coal-yard there, was its conductor. His name was Richard Marcy and afterwards he was to come to prominent position, not only as exclusive holder of its coal-selling franchise for a number of years, but also as a politician of real parts.
In 1858, the little road doubled its passenger service. Now there were two passenger trains a day in each direction. And each was at least fairly well-filled, for the Black River & Utica held as its supreme attraction Trenton Falls. Indeed, if it had not been for the prominence of Trenton Falls as a resort in those years, it is quite probable that a good many folk in the State of New York would never have even heard of it.
THE BIRTH OF THE U. & B. R.
The Boonville Passenger Train Standing in the Utica Station, Away Back in 1865.
But Trenton Falls—Trenton Falls of the sixties, of the fifties—all the way back to the late twenties, if you please—here was a place to be reckoned! All the great travelers of the early half of the last century—European as well as American—made a point of visiting it. The most of them wrote of it in their memoirs. That indefatigable tourist, N. P. Willis, could not miss this exquisitely beautiful place—alas, in these late days, the exquisitely beautiful place has fallen under the vandal hands of power engineers, and the exquisite beauty no longer is. Trenton Falls is but a memory. Yet the record of its one-time magnificence still remains.
“... The company of strangers at Trenton is made somewhat select by the expense and difficulty of access,” wrote Willis, late in the fifties. The Black River & Utica had then barely been opened through to the Falls. “Most who come stay two or three days, but there are usually boarders here who stay for a longer time.... Nothing could be more agreeable than the footing upon which these chance-met residents and their daily accessions of newcomers pass their evenings and take strolls up the ravine together; and for those who love country air and romantic rambles without ‘dressing for dinner’ or waltzing by a band, this is ‘a place to stay.’ These are not the most numerous frequenters of Trenton, however. It is a very popular place of resort from every village within thirty miles; and from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon there is gay work with the country girls and their beaux—swinging under trees, strolling about in the woods near the house, bowling, singing, and dancing—at all of which (owing, perhaps to a certain gypsy-ish promiscuosity of my nature that I never could aristocrify by the keeping of better company) I am delighted to be, at least, a looker-on. The average number of these visitors from the neighborhood is forty or fifty a day, so that breakfast and tea are the nearest approach to ‘dress meals’—the dinner, though profuse and dainty in its fare, being eaten in what is commonly thought to be rather ‘mixed society.’ I am inclined to think that, from French intermixture, or some other cause, the inhabitants of this region are a little peculiar in their manners. There is an unconsciousness or carelessness of others’ observation and presence that I have hitherto seen only abroad. We have songs, duets and choruses, sung here by village girls, within the last few days, in a style that drew all in the house to listen very admiringly; and even the ladies all agree that there have been very pretty girls day after day among them. I find they are Fourierites to the extent of common hair-brush and other personal furniture—walking into anybody’s room for the temporary repairs which belles require on their travels, and availing themselves of whatever was therein, with a simplicity, perhaps, a little transcendental. I had obtained the extra privilege for myself of a small dressing room apart, for which I presumed the various trousers and other merely masculine belongings would be protective scarecrows sufficient to keep out these daily female invaders, but, walking in yesterday, I found my combs and brushes in active employ, and two very tidy looking girls making themselves at home without shutting the door and no more disturbed by my entrée than if I had been a large male fly. As friends were waiting I apologized for intruding long enough to take a pair of boots from under their protection, but my presence was evidently no interruption. One of the girls (a tall figure, like a woman in two syllables connected by a hyphen at the waist) continued to look at the back of her dress in the glass, and the other went on threading her most prodigal chevelure with my doubtless very embarrassed though unresisting hair-brush, and so I abandoned the field, as of course I was expected to do ... I do not know that they would go to the length of ‘fraternizing’ one’s tooth-brush, but with the exception of locking up that rather confidential article, I give in to the customs of the country, and have ever since left open door to the ladies....”
We have drifted away for the moment from the railroad. I wanted to show, through Mr. Willis’s observant eyes, the Northern New York of the day that the Black River & Utica was first being builded. One other excerpt has observed the various sentiments, sacred and profane, penciled about the place and its excellent hotel and concludes:
“... Farther off ... a man records the arrival of himself ‘and servant,’ below which is the following inscription:
“‘G. Squires, wife and two babies. No servant, owing to the hardness of the times.’