e
of this road is its own telegraph, which runs by the side of the road
and has its operator in nearly every station house. This telegraph has
a double wire, enabling the company to transact the public, as well
as their own private business. Daily trains leave for the west on this
route, with connections by boat from the foot of Duane Street, morning,
noon, and night."

The Erie Railroad system was foreshadowed in the time of Queen Anne,
when the Colony of New York appropriated the sum of five hundred dollars
to John Smith and other persons for the purpose of constructing a public
road connecting the port of New York with the West in the vicinity of
the Great Lakes. The appropriation was coupled with the condition that
within two years the beneficiaries should have constructed a road wide
enough for two carriages to pass, from Nyack on the Hudson River to
Sterling Iron Works, a distance of about thirty miles; and that they
should cut away the limbs of trees over the track in order to allow the
carriages to pass. In this way began the internal improvement system
of the State of New York, which after the lapse of more than a century
resulted in opening the Erie Canal and in projecting a railroad system
connecting New York and the valley of the Hudson with Lake Erie.

After the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the Legislature of New York
directed a survey of a state road which was to be constructed at public
expense through the southern tier of counties from the Hudson River to
Lake Erie. The unfavorable profile exhibited in the survey apparently
caused the project to be abandoned. But the idea still held sway over
the minds of many people; and the great benefits brought to the Mohawk
Valley and surrounding country by the Erie Canal led the southern
counties to demand a transportation route which would work similar
wonders in that region. This growing sentiment finally persuaded the
Legislature to charter in April, 1832, the New York and Erie Railroad
Company, and to give it authority to construct a line and to regulate
its own charges for transportation.

During the following summer a survey of the route was made by Colonel De
Witt Clinton, Jr., and in 1834 a second survey was made of the whole of
the proposed route. When the probable cost was estimated, many opponents
arose who declaimed the undertaking was "chimerical, impractical, and
useless." The road, they declared, could never be built and, if built,
would nev