Eddyville: the railroad just a heartbeat away

The problem with the giant fish was not the first intimation of mortality the community had faced.  Eddyville had had almost frequent close calls with destiny.  The D&H [Delaware and Hudson] Canal was completed in 1828 for the purpose of carrying anthracite from the coalfields of Pennsylvania to New York City.  It’s route tracked north reaching the Rondout Creek at Eddyville where the broadening span of the creek carried the canal-carried cargo onto Rondout, a deep-water inlet on the Hudson River a few miles east.  By 1840, with business on the canal humming David Burr mapped Ulster County for his New York State Atlas and awarded Eddyville enough point size in the type to convey a noble and important place, perhaps to signify the importance of the canal.  Locals didn’t see it that way.  The problem later would be the pernicious railroads, then all in prospect but about, in some people’s minds, to become important.  Whatever, the maps were in print and Eddyville had its copy.   A few years later the railroads were exploding and the grandest idea of the age just past, canals, becoming road-kill on the path to the future.  If Eddyville was disappointed the details have gone unreported.  But like Casey at the bat it was strike one.

Strike two would not arrive for almost twenty-five years.  The occasion would be the building of a north-south railroad connecting budding metropolises in Orange County with a string of hopefuls extending all the way to New York State’s first capital, Kingston, Rondout’s Siamese twin.  This industrial enterprise called the Wallkill Valley Railroad, had been initially built from Maybook to Shawangunk where we assume its promoters found only cows and a few people to milk them.  The promoters then issued a manifesto in 1863 with the proposed route for a further section – Shawangunk to Kingston.  What with the war and all the plan was not enacted for another four years after which the line was constructed by local subscription.  The 1863 map and plan, a signal document heralding the arrival of the industrial age to a county whose chief productions had hitherto been manure, cores and pits, showed, in graphic detail, the route and it would miss Eddyville by a whisker.   Strike two.  The final leg, on the way into Kingston would bypass Eddyville; passing close enough for hot embers to light local grass fires but not close enough for local citizens to use the train with any regularity.  “We’ll hear it and smell it well enough but not use it much as it’s over the hill and about a mile away.”  A few years later operation began and for several years the Wallkill Valley Railroad was an important link west.  For Eddyville it was again a case of being the bridesmaid.