Railroad Magazine, Vol. 55, No. 2, July, 1951, Pages 114-116

Angus Wood’s Relic

By Watson B. Berry

Taking a look recently at what is left of the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain Railroad, latterly known as the Rutland, I found many memories of a boyhood spent in and around our railroad station, in the wood, tie and pole yards, and the railroad blacksmith shop, where they doctored the sick iron rails.

That 118 miles of railroad, stretching across the North Country and “The In Between Land,” from Ogdensburg to Lake Champlain, was opened for business late in 1850. Will it disintegrate and fall in pieces like the poet’s wonder one-hoss shays? is the question puzzling the inhabitants  in this centennial-plus of the road whose first corporate name was the Northern of New York.

Rummaging in an In-Between Land attic I came across a box of odds and ends accumulated in the ’70s and ’80s. There were 70-year-old copies of the Youth’s Companion and the famous annual Premium List issued by its publishers, Perry Mason & Co. They were yellow with age. Fishhooks and old jack-knives were there, too, with all their shine gone. There was only one article that had resisted the ravages of time. It was a chip of broken bone in an envelope that bore the notation: “From Angus Wood’s left elbow when his arm was smashed trying to make a fancy coupling, October, 1879.”

That piece of bone discarded by the doctors when they were dressing Angus Wood’s elbow was a precious possession for a 10-year-old boy. And it revived some railroad history.

In that year of 1879 the O&LC woodburning engines were still in their glory and the rails were iron. So a village like Lawrence with a big woodyard, livestock yards and a railroad blacksmith shop, was a boy’s paradise.

A group of eight boys had organized a secret society. They called it the Perry Mason Lodge, after the publishers of the Youth’s Companion. Their business was getting subscribers for that greatest of all boys’ papers, which flourished for more than 100 years, until 1929. The Perry Masons, as they called themselves, had managed through great perseverance to gather in 35 new subscribers. And Dennis Pasha, son of Peter Pasha, the station agent, had badgered his father into letting the Perry Masons have a room as a lodge high up under the roof of the freight house, in its west gable. It had been built by Jim Lancto, Mr. Pasha’s assistant. Jim was a topnotch telegrapher, handy with tools, and was a bachelor. He had enjoyed building the flight of 50 plain board steps and was just settling down to enjoy his bachelor hideout when a scout from the Utica & Black River Railroad lured him away with a better salary than he was getting from the O&LC.

It was a big step-up for the Perry Masons when they moved from a tent in the Pasha orchard to their lodge room up under the station roof, 30 feet above the croquet ground used by the station agent and his cronies. It gave them a close, inside, favored position in all the goings-on in the station and stockyards, the blacksmith shop and the wood, tie and pole yards. They were envied by the other village boys, who could only become Perry Masons by subscribing to the Youth’s Companion.

There were other advantages that went with this close association with railroad men. They could ride in freight train cabooses to the next station and back. They could use that most useful tool, the pinch-bar. With it a man or boy could move a freight car, as was often done in edging a cattle car slowly and exactly to the chutes from the stock yards. They were allowed sometimes as a special favor to push hand trucks loaded with butter into the refrigerator cars on the freight-house siding. It was hard work and was done willingly, proudly, and without pay. Ten-year-old boys would work like beavers, at no pay, for the privilege of using the pinch-bar or for a ride in a caboose.

The Perry Masons soon knew all the conductors and engineers, many brakemen and the mighty fellows who ran the railroad blacksmith shop. There was a big boy, too old to be a Perry Mason, whose father was a helper in the cavernous freight-house. His name was Angus Wood. He aspired, like scores of other village and farm boys, to be a brakeman. The brakemen of 1879 were truly brakemen, not merely trainmen. They manned the brakes, the only way of slowing down or stopping a train, for the Westinghouse air brake, though invented at least 10 years before, was not in general use on freight trains. While the brakemen, as they were correctly named, were then paid small wages, around $50 a month, there was always a scramble to get those dangerous jobs. Some of my earliest recollections are of the freight brakemen running from car to car on the foot-wide catwalks and “putting on the brakes.”

Angus aspired to one of these risky jobs. Occasionally a brakeman would lose his footing in sleety weather and fall from a fast-moving train. Every village along the line had evidence of the risky nature of the brakeman’s job. There were broken legs aplenty. Practically every village had a one-armed youngster to show how dangerous the job was. It took good timing to couple and uncouple freight cars. Angus was practicing it one day. There were no Gould automatic couplers. Angus missed. His left arm was smashed. They carried him home on a handcart.

The Perry Masons were right on the job, hanging around the Wood home. Some of them crowded into Mrs. Wood’s neat kitchen, where they could glimpse the doctors in the spare bedroom, working on Angus’ elbow. When a doctor threw into a basket some bloody gauze and the bone chip from Angus’ elbow I edged into the room and picked up that piece of bone. The whole house reeked of chloroform, a new and unforgettable smell to the Perry Masons. I clung to that bone for several years, till it was time to put away childish things.

Angus got well, but his left arm was never much more useful than to look like a good arm, which it wasn’t. His hopes to be a brakeman and eventually a conductor were dashed.

Angus was the sort of boy who was pointed out as “a real good boy” by mothers when chiding their own for some misdeed. Angus wrote a good hand and was soon helping Peter Pasha, who was due to retire. He learned to pound the telegraph key and could send and take with the best of operators. Promotion came fast for him and in a couple of years he was assistant at the Mooers Junction Station and eventually became the agent there. He spent the rest of his life in that job.

We were proud of “our railroad,” some 30 years old. Every boy along the line felt a vested interest in it. There were few who did not at some time fully intend to become railroad men.

Only one member of the Perry Masons became a real railroad man. Many tried, working at various small railroad jobs, then they tired of it and went back to the farms or to more schooling. The one Perry Mason who stuck to it was Eugene Newcomb. He wanted to learn to telegraph. He stipulated that if he joined the Perry Masons the premium for the new subscription must be a Bunnell telegraph set—sending key, sounder and batteries. The Premium List of the Youth's Companion had the set as a premium for one new subscriber, plus 75 cents, which Gene undertook to pay. He insisted too on the set being installed in the lodge room, up under the freight-house roof.

Peter Pasha looked the set over when it was unpacked in his office. Peter was as much interested as any of us. He gave us wire and the chemicals for the batteries, connected the set with the instruments in his office and made a proposition that roused our enthusiasm.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, boys,” he said. “If any of you learn to send and take fast he can have a job here or at some other station as soon as he’s old enough to leave home.”

Gene Newcomb spent most of his time up there in the lodge room, practicing away like nobody’s business. The rest of us dabbled at it, but he stuck to his key. He was soon as good a telegrapher as anyone from Ogdensburg to Rouse’s Point. He became assistant to J. A. Proctor, agent at Malone, later for many years Rutland’s assistant general freight agent.

Gene was promoted and spent the rest of his life as agent of the Rutland at Burlington.

On my recent visit there, I could not find anyone who looked forward to a railroad career.

They have forgotten in the North Country it was the Northern Railroad that opened that isolated region and really put it on the map some 100 years ago. Its centennial passed unnoticed.