Chapter Seventeen:
Moguls
"The Lake Shore will undoubtedly furnish a grade essentially level, and it is hardly possible to form an estimate of the magnitude of the travel that will concentrate on the route, soon as a suitable railroad shall be constructed on it."
—Report on the Preliminary Surveys for the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad Company, 1850
In some ways, the story of Amasa Stone shared much in common with the Yankee farmers of Euclid who came west to Ohio to seek their fortunes. Stone, too, had been a New England farm boy, plowing his father's fields in Charlton, Massachusetts. But by the time of his death he had amassed a fortune so large it could hardly be counted. One estimate had it at $6 million, another at $8 million. One placed it as high as $22 million. And these were 1883 dollars, and 30 years before the inception of the federal income tax. Such wealth, even at the lowest estimate, was vast. He lived in one of the most opulent homes on Millionaires' Row, Cleveland's once world-famous neighborhood of some of the country's most fabulous mansions, along Euclid Avenue from Erie Street to Willson, East 9th to East 55th, now long gone. Among his peers he counted John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. His daughter married John Hay, confidant of Henry Adams and Abraham Lincoln, and Secretary of State for William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In the end for Amasa Stone none of it mattered, though. In that beautiful Euclid Avenue house late one spring afternoon, after weeks of insomnia and persistent depression, Stone filled the bath, lay still clothed in the water, pointed a revolver at his chest and ended his own life.
*
The opening of Amasa Stone's Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad on November 15, 1851, marked a turning point in the history of Euclid Township. Through its subsequent consolidations and mergers the road served as an economic engine, commercial entrepot, and demographic and political catalyst in the township and its daughter communities. After thousands of years uncontested, the CP&A finally supplanted Euclid Avenue as the quickest transit to and from the township. Its yards and tracks were the theater and its employees and their families the actors for a significant portion of the drama of the next phase of the American occupation of Euclid Township. In numerous and important ways, the mercurial Stone and his railroad made the cities since carved from the township what they are today.
Amasa Stone began as a carpenter making cabinets, moved on to churches and finally to bridges, working with his brother-in-law, William Howe, as a contractor. The two specialized in building the Howe truss bridge, a novel design of Howe's which combined diagonal wooden timbers and vertical ties made from iron. The Howe truss caught on fast with the railroads the tracks of which were rapidly spiderwebbing across New England. In 1842 Stone went into business and bought out the rights to the Howe truss. After the purchase Stone tinkered with the design, making his own special changes based on his experience as a builder.
He had an insatiable desire to build bigger and more. In 1847, Stone entered partnership with Frederick Harbach and Stillman Witt and together the three made a successful bid to build the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad, the project that brought Amasa Stone to Cleveland. While still at work on the CC&C, Harbach, Stone and Witt, as the firm was known, won another contract, the one significant to this essay, and on July 27, 1850, agreed to build the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula, the rail link that would connect Euclid Township to the world.
The firm surveyed two routes for the line along the Lake Erie shore, roughly parallel. The Euclid Township section of both surveys ran along the lake plain less than a mile apart. Though the two routes were nearly identical, Harbach, Stone and Witt, chose the northern one, which was slightly shorter, slightly flatter, slightly straighter, and cheaper to build by $43,000.
The road cut a path of gravel and iron through some of the most fertile farmland in Euclid Township. "The country through which this road passes," wrote one reporter for the Cleveland True Democrat on the CP&A's opening day, "is much of it adapted to grazing and dairy purposes. Fat cattle, turkeys, chickens pigs, sheep, eggs &c. are raised all along the line, and cheese and butter are manufactured in abundance—much of which will find a market at the seaboard." To the east the road connected with the rail lines of central New York, and at Cleveland it joined Stone's own Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati and on to destinations in what, by 1851, had supplanted Ohio as the new West.
Stone moved from construction to administration of the CP&A and up the ladder of management quickly. After a year as superintendent of the railroad he joined the Board of Directors in 1853, and five years later ascended to the presidency of the company. The railroad weathered the Panic of 1857 and despite the trepidation of some early investors trounced the competition for passengers and freight from the Lake Erie steamboats. The Civil War was a boon. Profits rose every year from 1860 to 1864. Nor did the war stop expansion and infrastructure improvements in the North. Notably, in 1863, the CP&A spent nearly $78,000 to replace a wooden bridge on their line over the Ashtabula River—east of Euclid Township about 20 miles from the Pennsylvania line—with a Howe truss made completely of iron of Amasa Stone's own design. Stone's all-iron Howe truss was up and carrying trains over the gorge of the Ashtabula in 1865.
Seemingly endless mergers and consolidations marked the American railroad industry in the 19th Century, as they elbowed and dealed to acquire more lines and more track, integrating their operations, stretching service further and further west. The CP&A acquired by lease the engines, tracks and cars of the Cleveland & Toledo Railroad in 1867, and the following year renamed the combined company the Lake Shore Railway to market its enhanced coverage of the entire south shore of Lake Erie. In the spring of 1869, the Lake Shore merged with the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana Railroad and the directors named the new conglomerate the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, a moniker that would hang upon this road through Euclid Township and its rolling stock well into the 20th Century. In 1873, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern itself became a subsidiary of the massive and growing New York Central Railroad, controlled by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the aging but potent New York steamship tycoon and relative newcomer to the railroad business, whose own fortune made Amasa Stone's embarrassment of riches look like a charity case. When LS&MS president Horace Clark died in June of that year Vanderbilt was elected president of the railroad less than two weeks later. One of Vanderbilt's first acts at the head of the Lake Shore was to invite Amasa Stone to assume the position of Managing Director. Despite the change in ownership and the shuffle in management, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern kept its name, and its letters and logos remained painted on the cars of its trains.
Amasa Stone later may have wished they hadn't.
*
The evening of December 29, 1876, just as they often do today, a lake effect snow squall hit Ashtabula, Ohio, with blinding snow and wind gusts over 50 miles per hour. Laboring through deep drifts of snow the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern's westbound Pacific Express No. 5—two engines and eleven cars with 156 passengers and crew aboard—trudged onto Amasa Stone's all-iron Howe truss bridge over the Ashtabula River. The violence of the wind and the weight of the snow already strained the 165 feet long bridge when the train began to cross.
The lead engine had just made the other side when the engineer, a man named McGuire, had an odd feeling, as if the train had started up a hill. He looked back to see what was the matter and was terrified to discover the Ashtabula River bridge collapsing beneath his train behind him. In desperation, McGuire opened the throttle, trying to power the train over the failing span, but this move merely broke the coupling between his engine and the cars. As the engine made safety on the west bank of the river the middle of the train fell away into the gorge. The last eight cars had yet to move onto the bridge, but when the cars ahead plunged into the river they pulled those last down after them.
At the bottom of the chasm through the blizzard that still raged around the ghastly scene the horror hadn't ended. Amidst the broken bodies of the passengers, the shattered glass and splintered wood, the contents of the upended stoves which previously had been heating the cars through the winter night now mingled with spilled lamp oil and set the wreck alight. Those not smashed in the crash burned in the flames. Still others drowned as the icy water of the Ashtabula River flowed in.
It was reported that the people of Ashtabula, Ohio, did not deport themselves heroically that night. The fire chief, who had been warming himself through the blustery evening with drink, did not arrive for 45 minutes after the crash, and when he did, did little to aid the victims or extinguish the flames. Locals came, initially to gawk, but soon began to loot from the dead, then, terribly, from the helpless wounded. In the days that followed local photographers hawked stereoscopic images of the wreck.
Without effective or willing human intervention the fire continued all night and finally burned itself out the following morning. Ninety four people died that night or shortly after. The crash wounded an additional 57. Nineteen blackened bodies could not be identified, owing at least partially to the activities of the local thieves who had stolen many identifying items from the bodies.
The state held an inquest, interviewing experts in engineering and both Amasa Stone and the Lake Shore's chief engineer, Charles Collins. Questions arose as to the strength of the iron used in the construction, and whether the fact that Stone had purchased it from his brother-in-law's mill had anything to do with the disaster, but the metal was sound. Stone proudly admitted designing the bridge, but could not produce the plans, and suggested they should be in Collins' office. He denied giving the structure personal attention during construction, and again pointed to Charles Collins as the man responsible for inspections of the company's bridges. When Collins took the stand, the committee pressed the question as to the location of the plans of the bridge. Collins admitted that such papers should indeed have been stored in his office, but denied that they had ever been there.
In contrast to Stone's direct and terse testimony, Collins several times during his questioning went out of his way to make long explanations of why he hadn't personally inspected the bridge, why he hadn't been involved during construction, and to refute a rumor that he had once claimed Stone's design for the bridge was experimental. Whether these elaborate apologies reflect a guilty man attempting to cover his fatal negligence, or one not as wealthy and connected as Amasa Stone trying hard to clear his name before the public and the law during the one chance he had to do so, the transcript of the testimony cannot reveal. But it soon became clear that Collins was that day under severe stress.
When he finished his testimony Collins went to his home in Cleveland and fired a bullet through the roof of his mouth. His assistant discovered his body three days later.
The inquest found the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern completely responsible for the disaster due to defects in design of the Ashtabula River bridge and negligence in its inspection. Indirectly, both Stone and Collins were implicated. Collins was already dead when the committee issued its report. But Stone had broken no law and besides facing the outrage of the committee and the public went unpunished.
"The truth is," the committee reported, "the bridge was liable to go down at any time during the last ten or eleven years under the loads that might at any time be brought upon it in the ordinary course of the company's business, and it is most remarkable that it did not occur sooner. It would be needless to say that any engineer would be derelict in his duty who did not provide in the construction of a bridge against wind, snow, ice and the vibration of a rolling load. They are as much to be anticipated and provided against as the law of gravity."
The company re-spanned the Ashtabula quickly: railroads only earn when they are moving. The line re-opened just eleven days after the tragedy, which eventually cost the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern half a million dollars in lost property and damage awards to the families of the victims. Without comment neither the LS&MS, nor any other railroad, ever used an all-iron Howe truss again.
*
The New York, Chicago & Saint Louis Railroad was built to compete with the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern's parent New York Central, and its new head William Vanderbilt, the son of Cornelius, who assumed command of the rail behemoth when his father died in 1877. After nearly a decade of pleasant monopoly along the south shore of Lake Erie, the owners of the New York Central found themselves faced, seemingly overnight, by this upstart competitor headed by Indiana railroad promoter George Seney, who proposed to build a road purposely and directly from New York to far western Saint Louis, instead of buying and linking disparate companies in the way the New York Central had to grow to its gargantuan size. Seney organized his syndicate in February 1881. Construction began immediately and progressed at an astonishing rate, with 600 miles of track going down in just a little over a year and a half. Through Euclid Township the tracks of the new road followed almost exactly the studied but rejected southern route surveyed three decades earlier by Harbach, Stone and Witt in preparations for the construction of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula.
The New York, Chicago & Saint Louis came to be commonly known as the Nickel Plate Road, or simply the Nickel Plate. The origin of this name, in use even before the opening of the railroad, has been interpreted by some to mean "not authentic or worthwhile," but merely "Nickel Plated," and by others, in contrast, to mean "bright and perfect." The appellation may just have referred to the composition of the rails plated in durable, low friction nickel. But whatever the origin of the nickname it rolled off the tongue more economically than "New York, Chicago and Saint Louis Railroad." "Nickel Plate" soon became the method of choice for referring to the new line.
The Nickel Plate Road, the new southern tracks passing over the lake plain of Euclid Township, opened for service on October 23, 1882, and a mere three days later the Seney syndicate sold the road to a mysterious unnamed buyer. This buyer was eventually revealed to be Stevenson Burke, a Common Pleas Court judge from Elyria with long associations with northern Ohio railroads. Burke, it would later come out, was acting on behalf of William Vanderbilt. In a secret meeting in Erie, Pennsylvania they affected the legal transfer of the company to the New York Central in January 1883. Like the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, despite the takeover, the New York, Chicago & Saint Louis name remained on its properties and rolling stock. A day after the transfer took place the New York Central board elected William Vanderbilt president of the Nickel Plate, and with that the Vanderbilt leviathan regained its monopoly on the rail traffic of Euclid Township. It held it this time for 33 years.
Enormous combinations like the Vanderbilts' New York Central troubled some members of the federal government who feared that these large and uncontested monopolies undermined the foundation of competitive capitalism upon which the economy of the nation was constructed. To combat them Congress in 1890 passed the first of two laws that eventually destroyed the New York Central's sole control of the rails in Euclid Township.
This first blow came with the Sherman Antitrust Act, which attempted to outlaw business agreements that stifled competition, even to the point of forcibly dissolving companies found to be in violation of the law. The Sherman Act was an earnest attempt, but for more than 20 years flaccid enforcement and the law's numerous loopholes allowed it little headway toward its goal of encouraging competition by discouraging monopolies. Finally, in 1914, Congress passed a second attempt, the Clayton Antitrust Act, designed to rectify the weaknesses of the 1890 Sherman Act. The Clayton Act did its job on William Vanderbilt and the New York Central. In 1915 Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory informed the New York Central board that the company had to divest itself of the New York, Chicago & Saint Louis. Fortunately for the Central a pair of wealthy Wooster, Ohio, brothers were expanding their real estate projects to incorporate a railroad and happened just at that moment to have need of one.
Otis and Mantis J. Van Sweringen had been developing Shaker Heights in the countryside of eastern Cuyahoga County for over ten years in 1916 and needed only a section of track from East 34th Street to Public Square to provide light rail access from their "suburb" (a new word) into the central business district of Cleveland. But the New York Central's high motivation to sell the Nickel Plate under pressure from federal regulators provided the brothers an opportunity they couldn't pass up. In the summer of 1916 the Van Sweringens bought the Nickel Plate entire, mostly with stock, and got themselves into the railroad business.
William Vanderbilt had never cared for the Nickel Plate. He had bought it merely to eliminate its competition, and through Euclid Township he had a perfectly fine road already, and less than half a mile north. The Nickel Plate became the bastard child of the New York Central on the lake plain of Northeast Ohio and through its ownership had fallen into disrepair. Otis and Mantis Van Sweringen took a lively interest in their new acquisition, repairing dilapidated track, fixing up run down stations purchasing new cars and new locomotives. The investment proved wise and the brothers' new Nickel Plate Road soon began to turn a profit.
After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, the Van Sweringens' Nickel Plate served as a valuable conduit for troop trains ferrying soldiers off to the battlefields of Europe. In 1923 the brothers acquired the Lake Erie & Western Railroad and the Toledo, Saint Louis & Western Railroad, further expanding their rail empire. During the boom of the 1920s, the Van Sweringens merged their new love of rails with their old love of real estate and began work on a rail terminal on Public Square in Cleveland, the tower above which, the so-called Terminal Tower, completed in 1927, stood as the central city's landmark building for most of the 20th century.
But the Van Sweringens built their rail empire on figurative sand. Much of their wealth and capital they held in stock, and when the market crashed in 1929 the brothers' Nickel Plate Road crashed down with it. An $18 million government loan through the Hoover Administration's Reconstruction Finance Corporation spared the Nickel Plate from bankruptcy, but on May 1, 1935, the brothers defaulted on a $48 million loan from J.P. Morgan and the bank sold off their assets in September of that year.
Perhaps disheartened by the Nickel Plate's collapse, Mantis Van Sweringen died in December 1935. Otis, who had been very close to Mantis—the two brothers never married and lived together on a lavish estate in Hunting Valley, rarely accepting social invitations and working constantly—followed him from this world not a year later.
Passing before their railroad may have been just as well. When the Van Sweringens died their Nickel Plate's time was already nearly over.
Though given a final breath of life by the Second World War and another call by the nation to move men and materiel, with the passing of Mantis and Otis Van Sweringen ownership of the Nickel Plate Road began a three decade journey through the hands of various controlling interests.
After the war suburbs grew in what had been Euclid Township, as they were in the entire country, and automobiles replaced railroads in the everyday lives of the people for whom the tracks once made the whole rest of the world accessible. Interstate 90 opened through Euclid and the neighborhoods of Cleveland which had once been part of the township just north of the New York Central tracks in 1962, and not coincidentally the last passenger train left from Terminal Tower on December 7 of that year. Two years later the Norfolk and Western Railroad bought the Nickel Plate, and its last passenger train ran on September 9, 1965. Already having lost passenger travel to the car and relegated solely to freight traffic, the new interstate highway system destroyed that as well. As the freight business shifted to trucks, one by one America's railroads slipped into bankruptcy.
After the 1916 divestiture and throughout the saga of the Nickel Plate, the New York Central had continued on, still massive, still important, yet ultimately sharing the Nickel Plate's fate and destiny. In 1968 the ailing New York Central was compelled to merge with the Pennsylvania Railroad, forming the Penn Central, a new rail company no more viable than the old ones which it was meant to save, that promptly collapsed two years after its birth. In 1970 America's once mighty rail system was a mess.
Trying to solve the enormous problem of the implosion of the nation's massive rail infrastructure the U.S. Congress took over and merged several bankrupt railroads in the Northeast, including the Penn Central, into the Consolidated Rail Corporation, more commonly known as Conrail, in 1976. This time the plan worked, and Conrail became profitable by 1981. In 1987 Congress, as required by the law that created Conrail in the first place, turned ownership of the system back to the private sector through a public offering of stock. In 1997, two Virginia companies, CSX Corporation of Richmond, and the Norfolk Southern Corporation based in Roanoke—itself the result of the 1982 merger of the Norfolk Western rail system, which had taken over the Nickel Plate, and the Southern Railway of South Carolina—reached an agreement with the government to divide operation of Conrail. The deal brought the northern and southern tracks of Euclid Township back under the control of one company for the first time since the Van Sweringens bought the Nickel Plate from the New York Central in 1916 and into the configuration under which they operate today.
Amasa Stone's reputation never recovered from the Ashtabula Disaster of December 1876. His endowment of Adelbert College in 1881 for Western Reserve University on condition the university be moved from Hudson, Ohio, to Cleveland—the act that brought it to its current location on Nathaniel Doan's old farmstead at Euclid Avenue and Doan Brook, what is now University Circle—was indeed a generous gift, but was seen by many as the act of a guilty conscience trying to buy forgiveness.
For the remaining few years of Stone's life poor digestion, insomnia, overwork, hypertension, even eczema, made his days, though indeed cradled in wealth, hardly splendid. In early 1883 four of Stone's firms faced bankruptcy, and the growing American labor movement threatened new troubles at the rest. In May of that year he shot himself, leaving no note and providing no warning of his intention to do so to his family, save the misery he'd been living in already for some time.
With much ado his friends and relations laid him to rest in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery, just a hair's breadth west of the original border of Euclid Township, beneath a soaring obelisk emblazoned with the family "S," and, as if protesting his innocence in the Ashtabula tragedy and his subsequent fall from esteem from beyond the grave, an epitaph boldly proclaiming, "The Memory of the Just is Blessed."
The tracks of Amasa Stone's Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad, later the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, later the New York Central and Penn Central, now owned by CSX Corporation, run along the same course surveyed by Harbach, Stone and Witt in 1850, today sandwiched between St. Clair Avenue and Interstate 90. George Seney's, then the Vanderbilts,' then the Van Sweringens' Nickel Plate tracks, now property of Norfolk Southern, follow the southern lake shore route on which they were laid in 1881, just north of Euclid Avenue through what are today the Ohio cities of Euclid and East Cleveland. Trucks and automobiles dominate transportation in what was Euclid Township now, and the rails carry no passengers, only freight, the output of what remains of Euclid, East Cleveland, Collinwood and Nottingham's waning industrial base. Many of the main roads pass beneath the tracks through underpasses, and thousands of people drive by each day without ever noticing them, a development which would have infuriated Amasa Stone. These heavy cold strips of steel are significant though, and the cities and neighborhoods of what was Euclid Township would not and could not have developed as they did or have, nor be now what they are, without them.
The information in Chapter Seventeen is drawn from the following sources:
"Opening of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad" Cleveland True Democrat, November 17, 1851.
Bellamy, John Stark II. The Corpse in the Cellar and Further Tales of Cleveland Woe. Gray & Company, 1999.
Cary, Ferdinand Ellsworth. Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway System and Representative Employees, A History of the Development of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway, from its Inception, Together with Introductory and Supplemental Chapters, Tracking the Progress of Steam Railroad Transportation. Biographical Publishing Company, 1900.
Dow, Burton Smith, III. Amasa Stone, Jr.: His Triumph and Tragedy. Master’s Thesis. Western Reserve University, 1956.
Exhibit of the Character, Condition and Prospects of the Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula Railroad Company. Wm. W. Rose Printer and Stationer, 1851.
Hampton, Taylor. The Nickel Plate Road, The History of a Great Railroad. World Publishing Company, 1947.
Harbach, Frederick. Report on the Preliminary Surveys for the Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula Rail Road Company. Sanford and Hayward’s Steam Press, 1850.
Johannesen, Eric, "Stone's Trove: The Legacy of an American Oligarch." Timeline, June/July 1989.
Klein, Aaron E. New York Central. Bonanza Books, 1985.
Peet, Stephen P. The Ashtabula Disaster. J.S. Goodman Louis Lloyd & Co., 1877.
Rehor, John. The Nickel Plate Story. Kalmbach, 1965.
Report of the Joint Committee Concerning the Ashtabula Bridge Disaster. Nevins & Myers, 1877.
Simmons, David A., "Fall from Grace: Amasa Stone and the Ashtabula Bridge Collapse." Timeline, June/July 1989.
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website:
case.edu/ech