Railtown rivalries and a trail that runs through it

The story behind Port Henry’s challenge to Elizabethtown’s county seat status, in a loop on Champlain Area Trails’ Viall’s Crossing and John Brown trails

By Tim Rowland

For 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, the industrial village of Port Henry had been talking smack to the pastoral community of Elizabethtown, suggesting that such a backwater town had no business being the seat of Essex County. That distinction, Port Henry said, should be awarded to a thriving town that at the very least had passenger rail service.

By 1909 the editor of the Elizabethtown Post had heard enough, and with ink and spittle flying, countered the “shrieking” of the Port Henry press with an impassioned plea to keep the county seat in the hands of refined country gentlemen rather than entrust it to those coarse and ill-mannered snake thieves to the east.

At the heart of the debate was the railroad, which had come to the North Country in the late 1800s, but as yet had not made its way from the Champlain Valley over the mountains into Elizabethtown. How could you keep the county seat, Port Henry asked, in a backwater burg that didn’t even have its own railroad?

Elizabethtown thought this was a BS argument, but it must have hit a nerve, because as voters were preparing to decide the issue once and for all in a countywide referendum, town leaders announced that they would build a 9-mile spur from Westport across the Black River and over a mountain notch into their fair town.

Port Henry itself called BS on this, crying that Elizabethtown had no valid plans for a railroad, and this was a paper project designed not to carry passengers, but to fool county voters.

Some tangible features of this railroad-that-wasn’t still exist, and hikers who want to get the lay of the land can avail themselves of Champlain Area Trails’ Viall’s Crossing trail, which is tucked into an important little corner of Adirondack railroading history. Along with tramping in the vicinity of the Port Henry-Elizabethtown “railroad,” it’s the site of a critical right of way that provided the final railroad link between New York City and Montreal.

The railroad that never got off the ground

To Port Henry’s chagrin, voters affirmed Elizabethtown’s status as the county seat 115 years ago, and now that rail service was no longer needed, it was widely speculated that plans for what was called the Elizabethtown Terminal Railroad would disappear into the Adirondack ether.

But whether the rail spur was actually practical or not, by now it was a matter of pride for residents of Elizabethtown. The railroad company sold shares of stock to finance the line and brought in crews of Italians to begin grading work in 1910.

Previously, the Viall’s Crossing Trail began in Westport and traveled along this old railbed for a spell, but this has been abandoned at the request of the landowners. Instead, we parked on a recent foggy winter’s day at the trailhead on Route 22 north of Westport and entered a young forest to a junction with the John Brown Trail. 

Along with its railroading history, a farmer who once tilled the land here was an admirer of the abolitionist, and provided a wagon for a portion of the trip in which Brown’s widow accompanied his body back to North Elba in 1859 following the unpleasantness in Harpers Ferry.

The John Brown trail wends through some stately stands of old sugar maple before, at 0.35 miles, traversing a pasture with a view toward a valley of rolling farmland. After crossing a snowmobile trail, it re-enters the woods before looping around to rejoin the Viall’s Crossing Trail. Turning right on Viall’s Crossing quickly leads to a dead-end at private property, and now has no particular interest.

Completing the loop by turning left leads to a pasture with, on a clear day, a memorable window on Giant and Rocky Peak Ridge. All told, the Champlain Area Trails’ Viall’s Crossing/John Brown loop is an easy 1.5  miles with a mere 100 feet in elevation gain.

For a time, the Elizabethtown Terminal Railroad looked easy as well. By September 1910, the roadbed was finished for the most part, and the Post was optimistic that trains could begin rolling in the coming year: “We hope and trust nothing will occur to prevent this much desired consummation,” the editor wrote. 

In March 1911, engineers ordered wood for the remaining ties, along with timber for the 500-foot trestle bridge over the Black River. By April, 1911, a new engine and various rolling stock had been purchased for the railroad, including three flatbed cars that were to be loaded with $80,000 worth of rails from Carnegie Steel.

Everything was in place when, on the weekend of May 18, 1912, it began to rain.

A powerhouse on the Kingdom Dam about six miles upstream of the new railroad generated electricity for, of all places, the iron mines around Port Henry. By Sunday, residents were becoming concerned that the dam could fail.

An early Adirondack sport seems to have been sitting on horseback waiting for dams to burst, and then chasing the resulting torrent downstream to witness the havoc. When the Kingdom Dam failed, a rider recounted what he saw to the Post, reporting that bridge after bridge was swept away, including a substantial span over the Black River on the wagon road connecting Westport and Elizabethtown, which collapsed “like a house of cards.”

Several hundred yards downstream was the brand new trestle bridge just waiting for the first locomotive to chuff across on its way to the Essex County seat. The bridge stayed up. For a while. Then the waters ate away the earth holding up the cement abutments and away went the bridge and with it Elizabethtown’s dream of a great American railroading tomorrow.

Finances and the emergence of the automobile precluded any hopes for rebooting the effort, but ghosts of this old project remain — the easiest place to see it is from a wide pull-off on the left of Route 9N heading out of Elizabethtown toward Westport after cresting the high point between Raven Hill and Green Hill. There’s a narrow strip of state land there, and the rail bed is on the other side of the small brook, a remnant of a railroad that had an impact on Essex County, even if it never carried a passenger.