NORTH CANAAN — On Saturday, Nov. 16, at Union Depot, town historian Kathryn Boughton presented a talk titled “Canaan: The Town the Railroad Built.”
Boughton began by saying that a man walks about three miles per hour and a horse trots at about eight to 10 miles an hour and can cover about 30 miles a day.
Trains could reach speeds of 30 miles per hour by the 1830s and people could travel in one hour what it took a horse to do in one day.
“So, it is not hard to imagine the curiosity and excitement occasioned by the coming of the first train to Canaan,” Boughton said.
In December of 1841, the day came when the first train would arrive. “People flocked to Canaan to see the great sight,” according to Connecticut Western newspaper publisher John Rodemeyer, who compiled a scrapbook of “recollected impressions of persons who were there when the train came to town, an event already 57 years in the past,” Boughton said.
They came in “carriages, lumber wagons and two-wheeled gigs. They came off the hills and over, dressed in their Sunday best and work-a-day clothes. Many brought their luncheon and made a holiday of it,” wrote Rodemeyer.
Before the railroad came to Canaan, the town was sparsely populated. Back then, “The majority of houses were clustered from the corner of what is today the junction of routes 44 and 7 and Sand Road,” Boughton said. “But the coming of the railroad set off a land boom.”
In the coming years, the town began to spread from Main Street down what became Railroad Street. Canaan now had “dentists and doctors, a tinsmith, a harness and wagon makers, lawyers, a hat manufacturer, a silver-plating shop, blacksmiths and stone cutters. The town was well and truly established,” Boughton said.
The railroads began “to run excursion trains, both for special events and shopping.” Events such as “‘snow trains which brought spectators to town from New York City to watch the ski jumps created by the gang of youngsters who formed the Applewood Ski Resort on what is now the Granite Avenue Extension,” Boughton said. Train excursions also brought boaters to the Housatonic River by what is now the Falls Village power plant and bicyclists to ride on local roads.
But excursions to Bridgeport to shop at WB Hall & Company took business away from Canaan merchants. Canaan merchants blamed the Housatonic Railroad for causing this loss and “Inevitably, over the decades tensions developed between the railroad and the town.”
S. C. Beckley, editor of the Connecticut Western at the time, complained more tracks were needed.
“The running of so many trains on single tracks is quite an undertaking and it is also dangerous to run them by train dispatchers as a misunderstanding on orders is liable to occur.”
At that time, more than 39 trains ran through Canaan daily.
Railroads continued to be important in Canaan until automobiles took over many of the duties trains had performed.
The railroad is still evident in Canaan today. Its “economy still rocks to the rhythm of the rails and the revitalized Housatonic Railroad still serves local businesses, and they order products from afar and ship their own materials out from our plants,” Boughton said. “It is a living legacy of the forces that created our town.”
