Coursing Through Time

Railroads drove the river

By Taryn Plumb

Turley Publications Reporter

By the mid 1800s, the Ware River, as it curled its way through south-central Massachusetts, was a humming, droning sluiceway of commerce – a machine, some might say, in and of itself, much like the giant beasts of industry that it powered.

All along its banks, mills of stone and brick standing four or five stories drew from its ceaseless flow, powering machines that manufactured cotton, wool, logs and flour. Around these, tenement houses and other buildings grew up, like the seedlings from an overhanging tree.

Men and women – many of them immigrants – flocked to the sweaty, dirty, dangerous jobs to be had in the factories, where a constant, low din emanated from within.

Families grew. Manufacturers prospered.

But it wasn't until the century had begun to crest down into the next that a new innovation came, one that would transform local industry and bring it, heralded by a high-pitched whistle and a chug of steam, beyond boundaries its progenitors had ever imagined.

The railroad.

“Every city and town wanted to have a railroad,” explained Philip Opielowski, an amateur historian and railroad enthusiast from Palmer. “It was the most effective way to transport goods and people.”

Construction of the 50-mile Ware River Railroad, which traced the pathway of the watery ribbon that gave it its name, began in 1867. A branch of the Boston & Albany Railroad – a flourishing line with many extensions that spread across the region like spiderwebs – it ran from Palmer to Winchendon, passing through Thorndike, Gilbertville, Hardwick and Barre Plains along the way.

“A railroad will choose to follow a river because of easy grades,” Opielowski, explained. “That will put it next to the mills, too.”

The line, stamped out tie-by-tie and section by section of steel rail, reached Gilbertville in the summer 1870, according to “One Town & Seven Railroads,” a 2008 book penned by members of the Palmer Public Library's railroad advisory board. By Dec. 1873, it had arrived at its final destination, Winchendon.

Soon, it became a “high-volume” passenger and freight branch of the Boston & Albany Railroad, “passing through prosperous mill towns and idyllic scenery,” as explained in “One Town & Seven Railroads.”

Every day, a run originated at a “modest” yard at Barre Plains to gather milk along the route to Palmer, then trundled on to a creamery in East Cambridge. The line also carted paper, farm feeds, cattle, textiles, raw wool, cotton, coal, woodenware and furniture, halting at various stops along the way to collect goods.

And ultimately, it meant a “new start to social and business life,” according to historian Josiah Howard Temple.

“The great water power of our rivers had been in part utilized some years before, and large enterprises set on foot, but a drawback was the hard and costly transportation of raw materials and manufactured goods,” Temple explained in his 1889 history of Palmer. “The railroad removed or lessened this hindrance, and brought our factories and their products near to market.”

For instance, the time to haul from Palmer to Springfield or Boston shrunk from six hours to just one, Temple noted.

“It grew the economy dramatically,” Opielowski agreed. “Production increased in the mills, everybody just made tons of money. The mills grew so much because of the railroads.”

Even so, the towns along its length retained a sort of enchantment for visitors.

“The green meadows, the slow coiling river and the low range of hills seen from the height form a picture which never fails to charm,” Robert Derrah described in a 1904 chronicle of trolley rides through New England.

Similarly, Palmer, he gushed, “is pleasantly located among broken hills and narrow valleys.”

The area's networks of trolley lines also ran to Thorndike, Bondsville and Three Rivers. A trip from Palmer through the three would “consume” an hour-and-a-half and cost 15 cents, Derrah reported. Yet “it is well worth the time,” he asserted, “for the trip is a varied one, affording many fine river views with rolling country and fertile land.”

But just as the railroad impacted industry, the river effected the railroad – and adversely.

The water had its fury. After an annihilating flood in 1938, the slice of water rose above its banks, shifting the land, washing soil away, ripping tracks and shifting them around, like an angry child with Lincoln Logs.

The line was out of service for six weeks, and the owners “even considered abandoning the line,” Opielowski explained. But it did, indeed, reopen on Nov. 11 of the same year, and kept running along its rails for several years.

Things were never the same, however. American textile manufacturing waned as a result of increasing labor strikes, the devastation of the Great Depression, and the emergence of steel, chemical and automotive industries. As customers diminished and more cars whirred onto roadways, the Ware River line's passenger service was eliminated in 1950. In 1961, the New York Central Railroad absorbed the Boston & Albany Railroad, and, seven years later, the last train ran to Winchendon.

The mills, too, began to disappear, fading out slowly like ghosts. Over decades, many were torn down, burned, abandoned – some merely deteriorating, others destroyed in hurricanes or floods – as profits dwindled and demand decreased.

And, as all this occurred, the river began to recede from the mind, a forgotten band, an abandoned strip – left to run the course it had for millennia, unseen, untended.

NEXT WEEK: Ware River industry today.