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THE HORSE REVIEW
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1927
1222
SILVERTAIL
And the Golden Age of the American Road Horse By THEODORE JESSUP
INTRODUCTION
This story is really a collection of more or less disconnected memoranda relating to a region inhabited by high-class people who have for over one hundred years been rearing, training and racing the best driving horses in the world.
Orange County, New York, is one of the most beautiful regions of a state rich in beauty. Like a great park its tree-clad hills and mountains enclose broad, level valleys so agriculturally rich as to have made it famous for two centuries. Inhabited for the most part by people of as English descent as Virginia's, her nomenclature abounds with English names. You 1have Chester, and Warwick, Oxford and Salisbury, Little Britain and New Windsor, Newburg and Cornwall and so on even .to a Greenwood and Greenwood Lake, suggesting Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
The story is divided into four chapters and each chapter includes notes which will endeavor to show how Orange County Horses were a stimulus to literature and an inciting cause to membership in the Chicago Literary Club, before which it first was read.
Chapter I
THE RIDE OF JONAS SEELEY
It was nine o'clock on a September morning in the year 1807 that a man stepped up to the bar of an inn near the New York cattle-market, much frequented by farmers and drovers. He paid his bill for lodging of himself and ten-year-old son and asked that his horse be brought out from the stable.
"HQw 'far is it to your home, Mr. Seeley?" asked the proprietor. He had known his patron for a number of years as a prosperous farmer and drover from Orange County, who made one or two trips to the New York market yearly.
"By the way we have to go, it is about seventyfive miles," was the reply.
"Do you mean to say you expect to ride that distance in a day'?"
"Why, of course I do! We have good horses in our county-no better anywhere. The mare I am riding is second to none. I have ridden her in a day from my farm to Albany, a hundred milesmore than once.
"And the boy? Does he stay with friends here?"
"Not a bit of it; he is going to ride behind with me."
"Well, the horse that can carry two of you must be a stayer!"
Just ·then a stable boy brought the mare to the door. The inn-keeper came out and looked her over with admiring glances. Large and strong, well groomed, lithe and supple, she, stood before them a splendid specimen of an American edition of an English race-horse.
"What is her name, Mr. Seeley? Stars and garters! I think she may do what you say."
"We call her Silvertail because of that tuft of white hair in her tail. She is just eight years old. Her dam was the strongest and most spirited mare I ever owned, and her sire was Messenger, still living somewhere on Long Island. He's a thoroughbred, you know, imported from England about fifteen years ago."
The owner stepped to the horse, giving her an affectionate pat before he swung himself into the saddle and helped his son, Jonas, Jr., on behind. The rider carried no whip, no spurs jing·led at his heels, a plain one-bar bit was all the mechanism applied to her mouth. With an impatient jump the mare started off on her long ·journey. But she was quickly controlled by the rider with a gentle yet firm pressure on the bit until she settled down into a long, easy gallop. Mile after mile flew by under her ringing hoofs. Occasionally they would come to a sharp ascent in the road, when the two riders, senior and junior, would dismount and walk slowly to the top, giving themselves and the horse a rest. When the summit was reached, man and b_oy remounted and fairly flew down the gentle descents and long stretches of level valley roads. Frequently they slowed down to a trot or a walk as they met farmers with herds of cattle or droves of. sheep and other live-stock bound for the ~arket they had just left. Once they met the tn-weekly stage, which required one and one-hal~ days, with relays of fresh horses every ten miles_, to traverse the same distance the riders were domg in half the time.
By twelve o'clock, twenty-five miles of their journey had been completed.
A convenient cross-roads inn provided a place to rest and eat. The elder rider himself went to the stable to see that· not too much feed or water was given to ihis mount. He, too, himself removed the saddle, rubbed off the lather where the leather had chafed and carefully attended to every detail of the mare's comfort, before attending to his own and his son's needs.
After an hour's stop they were off again. The refreshment put them all in fine condition and as they neared home and one familiar scene after another came into view, both horse and riders seemed not to feel the fatigue of their arduous journey.
Galloping was easy for Silvertail and the last fifty miles were reeled off in six hours, so that when they reached Sugarloaf Farm it was only seven o'clock-in time for a belated supper.
But again the master did not seek his own comfort until, with the aid of his slave boy, he had seen everything possible done for the mare. And again, before retiring for the night, he made
JONAS SEELEY
The Breeder of Hambletonian 10
a trip to the stable to see that nothing had been omitted to assure Silvertail's comfort.
Jonas Seeley was known as a good horseman, and being that meant to him constant and unremitting care. Doubly careful was he when a severe strain had tried the mettle of his mount, as -0n this occasion. The next morning he gave Silvertail
a careful going over and found no evil effects of the hard ride of ·the day before.
A day or two later the father sent the son on an errand .with Silvertail over to Chester, to call on his wife's uncle, Mr. Peter Townsend, proprietor )f ·the Sterling iron mines-one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country.
Uncle Peter made fun of the boy, admired his mare and offered to buy her. He found that Jonas, .Jr., could meet him on his own ground with apt replies, and· assured him the mare was not for sale as she was soon to be bred to a stallion and raise a colt the next year.
The conversation shifted to Uncle Peter's past and the boy found his uncle was a mine of information about Revolutionary times. He took the boy into the front room and had him sit on the carved mahogany chairs, assuring him that Geor.ge Washington, LaFayette and other Revolutionary heroes, who had occasionally been his guests when passing through Chester from New Jersey to Newburgh-on-the-Hudson, had used these same pieces of furniture.
Uncle Peter had been thrown into intimate relations with the nation's leaders because it was his iron-works-working day and night without
ceasing for six weeks-that made the iron chain which was stretched across the Hudson River just above West Point, to prevent English vessels from passing up stream.
We may add that in the course of time one of Peter Townsend's sons, Isaac, settled in northern Illinois, at Aux Sable Grove, in Kendall County, where his initial purchase was the Waish-Ke-Shaw Indian Reservation. 'J:lhe son brought with him some of his father's furniture. A great-grandson of Isaac's inherited one of the George Washington chairs, who cherishes it as one of his most precious family heirlooms. And this son, Mr. Louis Martin Sears, is now a member of the Chicago Literary Club.
Isaac Townsend, with his sons, established in
the '40's, at Aux Sable Grove, the best equipped wood and metal working shops in that region. Owning thousands of acres of magnificent virgin forest and prairie lands, they developed an establishment representing the investment of many thousands of dollars. They brought along fine specimens of Orange County road horses and laid out driving tracks at their homes. When young Cyrus McCormick of Virginia came to Chicago and looked about for a shop which could make models of his mowers and reapers, he found what he wanted at the Townsend shops-forty-five miles from the city.
Thus began the great International Harvester
Co.
Chapter II
ORANGE COUNTY'S FAMOUS HORSE Jonas Seeley, the owner of Silvertail, was the father of a number of vigorous sons, several of whom achieved celebrity in connection with horses and cattle.
One, Jonas, Jr., was the breeder of the greatest sire of harness horses which ever lived.
Another, Edmund, was the owner for many years of another famous Orange County sire, Seeley's American Star, 14, a horse which once left his New York home and made a pilgrimage for a J ear to the Townsend settlement at Aux-Sable Grove.
A third son, Peter Townsend Seeley, was a pioneer live stock commission man of Chicago, being the first to sell a car-load of live stock at the then new Chicago Stock Yards. The race for generations were typical English country people. From generation to generation they were neither rich nor poor. '.Dhe husband dressed like a gentleman on occasions and toiled like a laborer often. He wore broadcloth, had his own and his wife's pictures painted in miniature, ate with solid silver ware on imported china, in a house furnished with mahogany. He often milked his own cows, cleaned his own horse stables, planted his own fields, and led the way for the hired men and perhaps slaves in the harvest field. He liked a horse race, kept and used a dozen kind of liquors in his sideboard, attended Church regularly on Sunday, often was eloquent in prayer at Wednesday night prayer meetings.
Jonas, Sr., was a leader in his county, winning prizes at the agricultural shows for his live-stock and once received the one given for the best kept farm in Orange County. He bred Silvertall to Bishop's Hambletonian-a son of imported Messenger-and the resultant foal, a mare known as
· One Eye, was in her turn bred to another imported horse, the trotter Bellfounder.
The foal from this mating, having passed out of the Seeley family became known as the Charles Kent mare.
Jonas Seeley, the younger, the boy of the 1807 ride, repurchased her, bred her to Treadwell's Abdallah, a grandson of imported Messenger and she became th_e mother of Rysdyk's Hambletonian, or Hambletoman 10.
There have been many famous horses in A~erica,_ but among them all, one stands out preemment m the number of his famous descendants and in the influence of his blood and that horse was Rysdyk's Hambletonian, the great-grandson of Silvertail.
Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the horse of the road in America was a saddle horse. Driving for the most part was impossible; there were neither the roads nor the horses, neither the vehicles nor the appreciation of their need. The English thoroughbred was a wonderful animal, but due to his style of going, ~here saddles were not needed he had few practical uses. For centuries he has been maintained in England, and in this country, as a plaything. By contrast the light-harness horse is recognized
the world over as one of the greatest triumphs of the industrial life of America. The change of gait began with the importation of Messenger, the English ·thoroughbred, in 1788. He lived to be
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THE GRAVE OF HAM13LETONIAN 10
As It Appeared a Few Years After His Death. From a Sketch by Frank Weitenkampf
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twenty-eight years old and spent his life in New Jersey, on Long Island and in Orange County. The remarkable trait in his descendants was their ability to maintain the trot or running walk at high speed for long distances. As roads improved this gait became in demand and it was soon found to be a lucrative business to rear driving horses for the road.
Orange County breeders had descendants of Messenger in abundance, the king of them all being Rysdyk's Hambletonian. Tracing back through dam and sire, he had three near crosses to Messenger.
The latter was so appreciated in his day that on his death in 1808 he was buried with military honors, a volley of musketry being fired over his grave.
Hambletonian was foaled in 1849 and lived until 1876. His breeder, Jonas Seeley, Jr., sold him when a colt at his dam's side to his hired man, William M. Rysdyk, of Dutch blood. He spent his
· whole life in the village of Chester, not far from Goshen, Orange County's county seat. His owner died before his famous horse did, but left instructions to have him buried near the stable in which he spent his days. No Arab Sheik ever watched over and cared for a horse more carefully than did Rysdyk and Harmon Showers, his groom, part Indian, who had continuous care of him for twenty years. The horse proved a veritable gold mine for his owner. He sired in his life-time 1,333 foals for which the service fees received were $185,715. And half a century ago that meant almost as much as half-a-million would today.
He was lifted into his first great fame by his son Dexter. This famous animal, foaled in 1858, became the most widely known horse in America. In 184'5 Lady Suffolk had been the first to make a record at the trot better than 2:30; in 1856 Flora Temple reduced the mile time to 2:24½ and in 1859 lowered her own record to 2:19¾,. For eight years this record was undisturbed and unchallenged until Dexter, driven by .Budd Doble at Buffalo, N. Y., on Aug. 14, 1867, lowered the time to 2:17¼. This established a new world's record for a trotted mile. Immediately it was announced that Dexter had been bought by the Presbyterian deacon-publisher, Robert Bonner, of the "New York Ledger," for $35,000. Up to this time this was the most extraordinary 'price ever paid for a gelding. At one bound Dexter's fame became national. A picture of the horse with a rider mounted on him, going at full speed, was scattered everywhere. Weather-vane reproductions of this picture are still to be se_en on old stables all over Amer~ca; . country . newspaper~ still use a small cut of 1t with the rider removed, to illustrate horse advertisements. "Dexter Parks" were common. "Dexter" was the name on the sled of the '60's and '70's the boy received at Christmas.
Chicago has entertained in her time.many distinguished visitors. Some individual has appeared at a great convention and voiced an idea which has influenced a nation's actions; some_ celebrity has held us all with interested attention and what he said or did 1has profoundly affected the city, the West, the nation. Such an occasion was her first national convention, the River and Harbor Con-
vention of the '40's, reported by Horace Greeley; bhe Republican Convention of 1860, which nominated Abraham Lincoln, when a Pennsylvania Judge read the "platform," which by contrast with modern convention productions reads like a chapter from the Hebrew prophets; it was a dramatic moment in the Garfield Convention of 1880, when Roscoe Conkling, rising to nominate Grant for a third term, shook his splendid curl over his magnificent forehead as he started •his speech with the rhyme:
"When asked what state he hails from, My sole reply shall be:
He hails from Appomattox
And her famous apple-tree!"
Famous works of art have visited us, such as Millet's Angelus which taught the .artists so to paint simple scenes as to convey an emotion to the onlooker.
Royalties have honored us, as did the stripling Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward the Seventh, in 1860 and Prince Henry, the Kaiser's brother, in the '90's. · But I doubt if in Chicego's eighty-one years of life there has been a welcome accorded to any visitor more universal in its appeal than the one given to the trotting horse Dexter, when he appeared there in September, 1867.
· He, too, was a royalty, the king of the roadhorse world.
The story is told that Deacon Bonner invited Henry Ward Beecher to ride with him through Central Park behind Dexter. When thoroughly warmed up the horse was for a few moments beyond the driver's control, but when Mr. Bonner managed to take him back a trifle he noted that his passenger was clinging to the seat with both hands while tears were coursing down his cheeks. When •he asked him if he should stop the horse, Mr. Beecher replied: "Don't stop him, Mr. Bonner; Don't stop him sir! What you see are tears of, joy over a ride behind such amagnificent horse!"
It was Dexter's popularity, his becoming a household word the nation over, that centered the nation's gaze upon Orange County, his sire, Rysdyk's Hambletonian and his dam's sire, Seeley's American Star. From that time forward flourished for forty years the golden age of the American Road Ho-rse.
The village of Chester, where Hambletonian was born, lived, died and is buried, had an academy attended among others by the Seeley boys, which was presided over by William Bross, a college-bred school teacher, who had married a daughter of Dr. Jansen, of near-by Goshen. The death of a child in this family suddenly determined the teacher to give up his school and move to Chicago, which he did in 1848, seventy-nine years ago.
This man, with his brother-in-law, Mr. Jansen, and Mr. A. C. McClurg, started the great book store long known as Jansen, l\'fcClurg & Co., later A. C. McClurg & Co., of which the present Brentano store is the successor. Mr. Bross, often re-
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THE GRAVE OF KAMBLETONIAN 10 Showing the J\fonument as It Appears Today
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THE HORSE REVIEW
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1927
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ferred to as "Deacon" Bross, took up journalism and was part owner of one or two papers which were afterwards merged into the Chicago "Tribune," so that with Joseph Medill he was co-founder of our well known "W. G. N." Mr. Bross maintained his connection with the paper until his death and his financial interests therein are still held by his grand-children.
Now the relationship is very plain here between Orange County horses and their owners, both of whom Mr. Bross knew and admired, and the Chicago Literary Club, for was not his son-inlaw, Mr. Henry Demarest Lloyd, a Jong time member of this club, as well as his nephew, Mr. Mason Bross?
The story of Rysdyk's Hambletonian and the American Road Horse in ,general has often been written, and, in particular, was set forth with eloquent amplitude and legal exactness in a book published by H. T. Helm, a Chicago lawyer, in 1878. This beek was first tried out as a serial in the "National Live Stock Journal," of Chicago. 'I'hat publication was the fore runner of the "Breeder's Gazette," one of whose editors, Mr. DeWitt Wing, is a member of the Chicago Literary Club. Mr. Wing affirms that he hasn't the slightest interest in driving horses and yet I trust I make it perfectly clear that his association with a paper whose ancestry did have great interest therein has reacted upon him and brought him into the fold.
Yet more remarkable is the fact that the late beloved president of our club, Mr. Wm. M. R. F'rench, was a son-in-Jaw of this horse-loving lawyer, Helm.
It does take a high-class people to associate with the high-class horse.
Ohapter III
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ROAD HORSE The forty years from 1865 to 1905 I venture to call the Golden Age -0f the Road Horse.
In this time the fame of the great trotters, of which Dexter was the most widely known, reached the smallest villages; wherever newspapers penetrated, there the accounts of the trotting horse races were eagerly read and discussed. Drivers and trainers like Hiram Woodruff, Orrin Hickok, John Splan and Budd Doble became national celebrities. Breeders and breeding farms of national fame were developed in nearly every northern state.
Many of these were the amusements of rich men; some were developed by poor men and made them rich. Who has not heard of Alexander's Woodburn Farm, in Kentucky, of Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Farm, in California, of Marcus Daly's Bitter Root Farm, in Montana, of the Highland Farm, at Dubuque, Ia., and, among and most important of all, the Alden Goldsmith Farm and the Stony Ford Farm of Charles Backman, both in Orange County? From this last farm went forth sires and dams to all parts of this country and Europe. Mr. Backrnan's nerve as ,a breeder can be illustrated by a single incident. Dexter was out of a daughter of Seeley's American Star and sired by Rysdyk's Hambletonian. 'l\herefore he assembled as many mares as he could, twenty-six altogether, all Star's daughters, and bred all of them in a single season of Hambletonian, paying total service fees to the amount of $13,000!
In the smoking room at Stony Ford gathered many well known men, whose interest in the road horse was the one thing they had in common. Here came artists, literary men, editors, statesmen, generals, ·the great men of their time; among these were Leland Stanford, William C. Whitney, Benjamin F. Tracy, Oliver H. P.ayne, H. 0. Havemeyer, C. J. Hamlin, Robert Bonner, L. L. Lorillard and General Dan Sickles. It was in this smoking room that General Grant, enfeebled by the disease soon to end his career, indulged himself in the last cigar he ever smoked.
"Hambletonians" were the favorites all over the country and Orange County was the fountain of supply. Hambletonian's sons and grandsons, distributed, were source of a mighty stream of track performers and good .road horses. There was scarcely a county in the northern agricultural states where one could not find representatives of Orange County stock. Progressive farmers reared a few road horses each year. A market was always to be found for ,a speedy and handsome trotter at a nearby city. Distinguished and well known men in New York, like Cornelius Vanderbilt and his son, William H.; John D. Ro·ckefeller his brother, William; Robert Bonner and other~ of the like, skimmed the cream for their private stables. They not only aimed to own the best but drove their own horses for relaxation and amusement. Their sxampls was followed far and wide. To own the fastest hoi se or team in his town or
city was a distinction for which many noted men strove.
Not every horse reared on the average farm was a speedy trotter; indeed it was only the occasional few who were good enough to attain the standards set in the cities, but their breeding put life, fire, and go, and vim, bottom and staying qualities in the light-weight work horses of the farm.
Incalculable benefit was brought about by speeding up the pace in the fields; on the road a good driving team became a necessary part of every successful farmer's equipment.
Interest in the best local horses was kept alive and stimulated through all these years by the county and state fairs held annually from Maine to California. The big crowds came on the days of the big trotting races. ·
Just as every farmer's daughter· expected to have a gold watch on her eighteenth birthday, so every farmer's son supremely desired a driving horse, or better yet -a team, and a new single-seat top-buggy for 'his twenty-first birthday. On the race days of the fair there gathered from miles around scores and hundreds of these single top buggies containing twenty-one-year-old sons and eighteen-year-old daughters, behind handsome horses. These rigs usually foregathered inside the race-track rail and faced the grandstand, thus allowing their occupants to be seen by the largest
THE GREEN MOUNTAIN MAID MONUMENT Erected by Charles Backman at Stony Ford
possible number of their friends and to permit them the same sort of private publicity afforded the box-holders at the opera.
Any one of these youths would doubtless have found it difficult to have told you the names of the presidents of his country in order; but you could count on his knowing what horses had held the best trotting records, from Dexter down to date.
Poorly informed, indeed, is the man and dull has been his career if he cannot yet recall with enthusiasm the name of such horses as Goldsmith Maid, sired by a brother of Dexter's, who took his crown from him in 1871 and held it for eight years, reducing the time to 2 :14. Rarus, an outsider, and St. Julien, by Volunteer, son of Harnbletonian, followed, then another granddaughter of Harnbletonian, Maud S., took first rank and held it against all comers for eleven years, except a brief period for one season when Jay-Eye-See, a grandson, temporarily surpassed her. In 1885 she reduced the record to 2 :08 ¾. Other speedier ones arose lowering the time record year by year. You all know their names, as Sunol, Nancy Hanks, Alix, The Abbot, and Cresceus. Finally in 1903, the two-minute record for a trotted mile was passed by Lou Dillon, who made it in 1 :58112. That record was lowered in 1912 by Uhl an to 1 :58. Today the champion is Peter Manning 1 :56 ¾,.
The breeding of road horses having become a national industry, an American Trotting Register was established to record pedigrees correctly. The first volume of this was published in 1871. A National 'I'rotting Association was established soon after.
With rich rnen rivaling each other t~ own or breed the best, fabulous prices were_ paid for choice animals. The breeders often received these large prices; for instance it is shown by recordJ of Woodburn Farm, Kentucky, that it reared an sold in the thirty years between 1866 and 1896, 750 animals which brought an average of $1,000
each.
Stony Ford made, once or twice, sales to a
single purchaser amounting to $40,000. Robert Bonner in the course of his long career spent $600 000 for the "extra-selects" he assembled m his ~tables. He paid $35,000 for Dexter, $40,000 for Maud S. and $41,000 for Sunol. In 1891 !Malcolm Forbes, a Massachusetts breeder, paid Leland Stanford $125,000 for Arion, a grandson of Hambletonian who had made a record of 2:10¾ as a two-year-old. In 1889 $105,000, had been paid for Axtell who made a three-year-old record of 2:12, a syndicate buying him from C. W. Williams, who bred him.
Hambletonian's fame as the greatest progenitor of trotting horses was spread around the world, and through him the descendants of Silvertail became as the stars in heaven or the sands of the sea-shore for number.
Toward the end of this period, however, clouds appeared on the horizon, indicating coming changes. Inventors of farm machinery, introduced gang-plows, heavier reapers, etc., and larger loads for the roads developed a need for heavier horses than the light-weight roadsters had been, while the cities demanded draft horses for trucks. This made many farms change to the rearing of the heavy horse. But the all-important reason for the decline in the rearing of the road horse was the invention of the automobile. That, however, is another story.
A young man, once upon a time, was wont to stand at the curb on New York's streets on the afternoons when her road princes were likely to drive by, watching if perchance he could see a Vanderbilt or a Bonner. He knew the famous horses in their stables by name; he knew the record which went with each one.
Occasionally his watching would be rewarded by a good view of these fast steppers .and equally well-known drivers; sometimes a famous general or ex-president would share the seat with the driver. He was standing "with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet" at the critical point of his career, undecided as to whether he should strive to become a great horseman like Budd Doble "with the catarrhal name" or stick to his books.
Eventually the books won, the turf lost, and he became a professor of mediaeval history, but his early association and knowledge of the best in horse flesh certainly had something to do with James Westfall Thompson's long time membership in the Chicago Literary Club.
TJ1e most conspicuous breeder of road horses in Chicago in ·the Golden Age was Arthur J. Caton. The head of his stud was a grandson of Hambletonian, known as Don Cossack. An Eastern rival so profoundly disapproved of this horse that he sent a telegram of congratulation to his owner when he heard of the Don's death! Subsequent to Mr. Caton's own death, his widow became Mrs. Marshall Field, wife of Chicago's great merchant.
In the '50's and '60's, Chicago owners of fast horses were accustomed to race each other in the winter on the ice of the Chicago river. The stream at that season was never used for boats and afforded, from Rush Street bridge to the branching forks, a good half mile of smooth roadway. One of the boys who watched these races with sparkling eyes, who knew the owners and the horses, and was sometimes permitted to try out his father's Morgan mare, longed for the clay when he, owning the fastest team in town, could clean up the bunch. This horse admlration eventually resulted in making Mr. Clarence Burley one of the most loyal members the Chicago Literary Club has ever had.
Chapter IV THE DECLINE
The automobile has profoundly changed the road horse situation, but it must not for a n1oment be supposed that the rearing of fast trottin"' ~orses has been abandoned. As a popular busines~ it no longer exists, but specialists still continue to rear and race the fastest horses ever known The reigning stallion of our day, Peter the Great· a_ great gran?-son of ~ambl~tonian, and th~ eighth generation from Silverbail, sired over 150 sons and daughters with official records of 2·l0 or better. But it seems to me that rearin · trotters has almost reached the stao•e whi hgthof
t .. cl. fh."' c e
raimng an racing o t e runnmg horse l ·
orig ago
1
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reached-a form of amusement rather than a phase of the practical needs of the ordinary citizen.
We started with Orange County, and to revert again to that delightful region is necessary, in this fourth chapter, to round out this appreciation thereof. At Goshen, four miles from Chester, is maintained the only half-mile track that has been continuously kept in use for upwards of a hundred. years. This, the so-called "Historic" track, is hut one block distant from the main st... [truncated due to length]
