58 
BENEFIT OF RAILROADS TO AGRICULTURE. 
BENEFIT OF RAILROADS TO AGRICULTURE. 
The New- York and Erie Railroad. —Twenty-five 
years ago, I left the city of New York to visit 
Binghamton. Eight hours upon a steamboat of 
those days carried me to Newburgh. Four days 
and nights, long, tedious toil in a post coach, 
over that region of mud and mountains, hills 
and hollows, and through vast, uncultivated 
forests, opened to our sleepy senses the valley 
of the Susquehanna, rich in its native pines, and 
covered with a fertile, uncultivated soil—for it 
had no market for the farmer’s produce—no out¬ 
let for a surplus, except down the long and dan¬ 
gerous voyage of a lumberman’s raft to the 
far, far away port of Baltimore. 
How the throng at Binghamton, gaped, open- 
mouthed, around “the man from York,” to hear 
his news “ in advance of the mail,” only four 
days old. Whoever then thought of things to 
come 1 Who, dreaming, would have dared tell 
his dream, that within less than a quarter of a 
century, a locomotive should be seen thunder¬ 
ing through the little quiet village of Bingham¬ 
ton, with thirty burthened cars, carrying 300 
tons of freight; and that this would come from 
New York, up and along the Delaware, and over 
the intervening mountains, down into this val- 
vey? Who then would have believed “the 
man from York,” if he had told the quiet villa¬ 
gers that after twenty-five years he should visit 
them again; that he would then take his break¬ 
fast in New-York City, and his supper in Bing¬ 
hamton 1 That the might and power of man ; 
that the persevering energy of the Yankee, 
would say to the granite hills—give way, and 
to the iron-bound points of rocks, a hundred 
feet high along the Delaware, we must pass; 
and that the hills should sink down, and rocks 
of ages, grown grey in their strength, should 
yield to the iron will of man, to make an iron 
road through these hitherto impassable moun¬ 
tain fortresses. 
No one would have believed the wild dreamer. 
But all this has been done. Who can realise it ? 
The New-Yorker reads of the New-York and 
Erie Railroad; little he knows of what its pro¬ 
jectors and builders have accomplished. The 
city lady rejoices that now she can sip pure 
milk, fresh from the mountain pastures of 
Orange county; but how little she realises what 
a mountain-moving power has been exerted to 
make a path to bring this sweet luxury daily to 
her door. Let them go with me along this 
mountain route, and be gladdened at the sight 
of its beauties, and filled with surprise at its 
wonders, while they equally admire the works 
of nature and art. 
Through the politeness of Mr. Loder, presi¬ 
dent of the company, I received a free pass to 
enable me to go over and examine the agricul¬ 
tural capabilities of the region through which 
the road has been made. How can I describe 
and journey through a region, and along such a 
road as this, and not have it appear tame and 
uninteresting, particularly to one who has ever 
been whirled along with the power of steam 
through the valley of the Delaware ? We leave 
the city, foot of Duane street, at seven in the 
morning, on board of one of the company’s ex¬ 
cellent boats, and directly after we are called 
down to a breakfast, ready for all that have not 
taken an earlier one at home. In two hours we 
are landed upon the almost mile-long wharf at 
Piermont, twenty-five miles up the Hudson. 
This is the first wonder. It must have cost 
nearly a million of dollars. Whether judi¬ 
ciously expended or not, I will not discuss. Here 
it is, and will remain an enduring monument to 
point to every passenger upon the river, the 
easterly terminus of this great road. It is very 
spacious, and brings the cars close down to the 
boat. 
The rails are of the K pattern, and very 
heavy; laid upon cross ties, and being six feet 
apart, give us very roomy cars; in fact, the 
best in this country. Now we begin to climb 
over the mountain barriers between the Hudson 
and Delaware; up through the rugged Ramapo 
Valley, winding along the Orange-county farms; 
noting at every station the rows of milk cans, 
and baskets of garden vegetables, ready for the 
“ market train,” until we come to that once old 
inland town, (now inland no longer,) of Goshen, 
fixed in my youthful memory as the home of 
the old “ butter hills,” of a bank whose capital, 
if not butter itself, was the product of it. At 
Port Jervis, we come down upon the Delaware, a 
moderate mill stream; seventy-seven miles from 
the Hudson, and thence along the river bank as 
much further, crossing it twice, through the 
wildest region that ever reverberated the start¬ 
ling scream of the locomotive whistle. At one 
point, the train is suspended, as it were, and 
it actually appears, when seen from below, as if 
upon a narrow shelf excavated out of the per¬ 
pendicular face of the mountain, where the 
very thought of a tumble is enough to make a 
sensitive man’s bones ache. What now shall be 
done to make these pine-denuded hills produc¬ 
tive, is a question that ought at once to be dis¬ 
cussed ? Why not cover them with grass and 
sheep, and send to New York the finest moun¬ 
tain mutton in the world, by every nightly train 
upon the road. 
Leaving the Delaware, at a wide-spread, scat¬ 
tering village on its banks, once a great lumber¬ 
trading town, called Deposit, now just emerging 
into an agricultural place of trade and forward¬ 
ing, we climb up the summit grade, nearly 60 
feet to the mile, and over about 20 miles to the 
Susquehanna at Lanesborough; crossing in the 
way the Cascade Bridge, a wooden structure, 
270 feet long, and 175 feet high; yet, as firm 
and unshaking as a rock. 
Two or three miles further on, and we are 
upon one of the noblest structures of this won¬ 
der-working age. The valley of the Starucco, a 
wild, raging mountain stream, where the deep 
snows send down their floods, is spanned by a 
solid, stone bridge, 1,400 feet long, and 100 feet 
high, built upon seventeen arches, and in such 
a perfect manner, that generations shall come 
and go, and yet that monument of man’s power 
to do good, shall tell to after ages the story of 
this great road. Still further along, upon an¬ 
other bridge, we almost pass over the top of the 
