FIRE-FIGHTING FORCE AT CRISTOBAL
Most of the people in Colon live over their stores and other places of business, though back from the business section are a few comfortable looking residences, and I noticed others being built on made land, as though the beginnings of a mild “boom” were apparent. The newer houses are of concrete, as is the municipal building and chief public school. The Panama Railroad owns most of the land on which the town stands, and to which it is practically limited, and the road is said to be encouraging the use of cement or concrete by builders—an exceedingly wise policy, as the town has suffered from repeated fires, in one of which, in 1911, ten blocks were swept away and 1200 people left homeless. The Isthmian Canal Commission maintains excellent fire-fighting forces both in Cristobal and Ancon, and when the local fire departments proved impotent to cope with the flames both of these forces were called into play, the Ancon engines and men being rushed by special train over the forty-five miles of railroad. Of course the fire was in foreign territory, but the Republic of Panama did not resent the invasion. Since that day many of the new buildings have been of concrete, but the prevailing type of architecture may be described as a modified renaissance of the mining shack.
THE NEW WASHINGTON HOTEL
It is idle to look for points of interest in Colon proper. There are none. But the history of the town though running over but sixty years is full of human interest. It did not share with Panama the life of the Spanish domination and aggression. Columbus, Balboa and the other navigators sailed by its site without heed, making for Porto Bello or Nombre de Dios, the better harbors. San Lorenzo, whose ruins stand at the mouth of the Chagres River, looked down upon busy fleets, and fell before the assaults of Sir Henry Morgan and his buccaneers while the coral island that now upholds Colon was tenanted only by pelicans, alligators and serpents. The life of man touched it when in 1850 the American railroad builders determined to make it the Atlantic terminus of the Panama road. Since then it never has lost nor will it lose a true international importance.
THE ONLY STONE CHURCH IN COLON
The ritual is of the Church of England; the congregation almost wholly Jamaica negroes
Manzanilla Island, on which the greater part of Colon now stands, was originally a coral reef, on which tropical vegetation had taken root, and died down to furnish soil for a new jungle until by the repetition of this process through the ages a foot or two of soil raised itself above the surface of the water and supported a swampy jungle. When the engineers first came to locate there the beginnings of the Panama railroad, they were compelled to make their quarters in an old sailing ship in danger at all times of being carried out to sea by a norther. In his “History of the Panama Railroad,” published in 1862, F. N. Otis describes the site of the present city when first fixed thus:
