Riding the Hucklebush Line
By Cynthia Owen Philip

Sometimes, for my own entertainment, I like to imagine I’m living in a different century. One of my favorite times is the 1870s. With all its ups and downs, the country was pushing forward with new ideas, new inventions and new products, yet it retained its down-to-earth ways. I like to pretend I’m riding the Rhinecliff and Connecticut Railroad. It was fondly called the “Huckle- bush” line because passengers claimed they could pick berries from the bushes as it slowly rolled along. Its primary reason for being, however, was to carry Pennsylvania coal east from the Delaware and Hudson Canal’s end point at the Kingston Rondout and dairy products, fruit, pork, beef and hay from Dutchess and Columbia counties west to Rhinecliff, where the steam barge Enterprise awaited to take these goods to New York City markets. Passengers were accommodated on most trains. They could hop the line to pay a call in a neighboring village or join one of the popular excursion trains. It was considered a special amenity for tourists.

When I follow the railroad’s route east it brings back those burgeoning times when Dutchess and Columbia counties were filled with farms and small manufacturing centers. From the Rhinecliff terminus, the Hucklebush passed Long Dock and climbed the embankment through the lands of William B. Astor. (He got a special station and a telegraph line out of it—and who knows what else!) Crossing River Road, the tracks ran up to the Hog Bridge, mainly a coal depot. (It’s in the dip on Mt. Rutsen Road just down from Northern Dutchess Hospital.) At Red Hook the train served the tobacco, tin and many smaller factories as well as farmers. It continued northeastward to Fraleigh’s and Cokertown and over the Columbia County line to Elizaville, Gallatinville, and Ancram. From Ancram it went north to Copake, a bustling settlement whose multiple products it simply could not forgo. After that detour it steamed southeastward to Boston Corners. From there it dropped down through that funny little jog of Dutchess County on tracks leased from the Poughkeepsie and Eastern Railroad to State Line. That’s about on a level with northern Rhinebeck, where Route 44 now enters Connecticut, making the R & C a sort of product- and person-gathering loop. From there it ran on the Connecticut Western tracks southeast to Hartford.

Building the Hucklebush
To the area’s farmers and enterprises accustomed to a horse and wagon round trip to Hudson River landings that took ten to fifteen hours, the R & C was a godsend. It immeasurably widened the horizons of every resident of the region it touched. Yet, the building of the railroad got off to a rocky start. Financing was the problem. The communities it would serve were expected to ante up. The three commissioners in charge of raising the funds for Rhinebeck pledged to buy $100,000 worth of bonds using, some taxpayers claimed, “fraud, misrepresentation and deceit of a most scandalous character” to do so. Led by William B. Astor, the nay-sayers sought an injunction and won.

This setback did not stop the railroad company. In 1871 appraisers of land for the line were tramping through Astor property. Soon five hundred men were working from two ends, Rhinecliff and Elizaville. By the end of the year, two miles of track had been laid and cars were on order. Plans were in the works to greatly enlarge Slate Dock. A magnificent real estate boom was expected. The editor of the Rhinebeck Gazette, always on the lookout for any local topic to satirize, wrote: “Our friend Cramer is laying out his farm in corner lots. The Legislature will be applied to for a charter for the City of ‘Hog Bridge.’ The principal streets will be paved, and lighted with gas. Charley will be Mayor, and the town bonds will be used to build a ship canal from the Hog Bridge to the State line.”

Unusually thick ice in the winter of 1872 meant that wooden ties—60,000 of them—could be hauled over from Kingston by horse teams, saving $35,000 in construction costs. By June 1873, service was operating to Red Hook. To celebrate the Fourth of July, the R & C ran an excursion train from Elizaville to Rhinebeck. The cars were tastefully trimmed with evergreens and bunting to disguise the fact that they were only flatbeds mounted with benches. (That’s one of the rides I imagine being on.) That fall the railroad was doing a steady business carrying coal—140 tons for Nicks & Hoffman in Red Hook, for instance.

In 1874 the United States was enveloped in a great depression, largely brought on by failed railroad speculations. But the Delaware and Hudson Canal people encouraged the R & C by buying bonds and work went forward. Iron was laid to Ancram by July. The cost of freight from that town to the steam barge Enterprise at Slate Dock, a distance of twenty-five and a half miles, was only $1.40 a ton, much cheaper than shippers could transport it themselves. By the end of the year the line was through to Boston Corners. The engineering office was moved from Red Hook to Slate Dock.

By 1875 a spur from Slate Dock to the Rhinecliff depot of the New York Central/Hudson River Railroad was under negotiation. Although there was a general strike in June and some workers were dismissed, the railroad was completed to the state line by August. Excursion trains ran to the Hartford races and to the Rhinebeck Fair, then held in the middle of the week in late August, just before the Dutchess County Fair.

Of course, there was a price to pay for such progress. Injuries, always a scourge during construction as well as when the cars started running, took their toll. In an article captioned “A Dastardly Attempt,” the Gazette reported that “an evil disposed person” laid a tie across track. Countless workmen’s lives were saved only because an alert conductor saw it in the nick of time. Other accidents did not have so happy an outcome. One of the saddest and most telling befell a sub-contractor named John Kelly, who was killed on the tracks when he and his wife were put off the train because he had no money for tickets.

Heyday of the Hucklebush
The train was not always on time. One of the most beguiling delays occurred when the conductor and engineer stopped to gather some beautiful basking turtles they had spied along the way. But nobody seemed to mind. Not only was the railroad a spur to commerce, it provided needed jobs, from superintendents to laborers. In 1876 John O’Brien, a principal contractor, built the grand house on the corner of Mulberry and Livingston Streets in Rhinebeck—the first structure in the town to be illuminated by gas—with proceeds from the R & C. Hundreds of workmen, mainly Irish, who had flooded into the area for construction, stayed on with their families after that work was completed. As long as it was in operation, running the railroad provided a major source of employment all along the line.

In 1880 the railroad’s rolling stock consisted of five locomotives—four for service, one for switching; one first class and two second class passenger cars, and one baggage car; twenty-one box cars, fifty-one coal and flat cars and ten service cars. Two hoisting engines were erected at Slate Dock by the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company. Prospects for profits seemed good. Yet the following year Thomas Cornell bought the entire railroad at auction for a mere $100,000. He held it for a year, then sold it for $800,000 in stock to the Connecticut Western Railroad. Nice profit!

Decline and Fall of the Hucklebush
The finances of the railroad remain a mystery to me. I somehow doubt that it never made money, as is said. If they were like other railroads, they were rife with creative bookkeeping. Whatever the case, during this period the R & C went through various bankruptcies and mergers until it became the Central New England and Western Railroad, a majority of whose stock was owned by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.

Although a R & C locomotive was first to cross the Poughkeepsie bridge when it opened in 1888, the bridge soon put an end to the railroad’s coal freighting business. Still, the railroad continued to be a boon to industry. When the Red Hook and Rhinebeck sweet violet industry took off in the late 1890s, one of its underpinnings was swift transport to the city. (By 1907, growing violets had become the main source of income for Dutchess County, earning more than one million dollars a year.) W. H. Baker’s Chocolate Factory, which made up to twenty tons of chocolate a day, moved from Annandale to Red Hook Village in 1900 to take advantage of railroad transport. The Borden’s Milk Company built its facility by the depot for the same reason.

Passengers continued to use the railroad as well. I would have loved to hop the railroad to school as so many children did or to have joined the southern Dutchess County firemen and their brass band bound for a jamboree in Hartford. They came up from Poughkeepsie on the dayboat, then transferred to what was by then the CNE & WRR at Rhinecliff.

Nevertheless, the railroad was nearing the end of its usefulness. World War I, the proliferation of automobiles and the collapse of the violet industry due to a blight and a change in women’s fashion—the light fabrics that had become the style could not support heavy bunches of flowers—weakened it dramatically. The Great Depression dealt it a final blow. Rhinecliff boys played on the huge turntable at Slate Dock and hitched rides on an occasional locomotive, but in 1938 New York, New Haven & Hartford got permission from the Interstate Commerce Commission to discontinue its unprofitable lines. That year the tracks were picked up and sold as scrap.

The countryside is still littered with traces of the Hucklebush, however. The most impressive are at Elizaville, where the station, earthworks and bridges still exist. Concrete foundations for what I imagine were the freight houses and perhaps the roundhouse and livestock corrals are discernible beneath the weeds at Slate Dock, as are remains of coal pockets at Hog Bridge. It’s easy to make out the railroad bed running parallel to Route 9 in the cornfield opposite Rhinebeck’s Stop & Shop. The much transformed Red Hook freight house is now the local Agway. The abutments of the bridge that crossed the Roeliff Jansen Kill stand tall today. I’ve even heard tell of a house in Jackson Corners that was built around the old whistle stop. Those of you who venture off the beaten path must have come across all sorts of other remnants too. But, alas, there’s no more plucking huckleberries from the fields as the Rhinecliff and Connecticut jogs along. Only in dreams.