Articles: Sharpsville First Railroad War

Sharpsville First Railroad War

This article is copyrighted and courtesy of the Sharpsville Area Historical Society. If you would like more information on the Sharpsville Railroad, inquire at sharpsvillehistorical.org or attend one of their meetings.

Sharpsville’s major link to the outside world in its formative years was the Erie Extension Canal, also known as the Beaver & Erie Canal. But as the Canal Era gave way to the Age of Rail, so too did these linkages to the outside world. While “General” James Pierce, then one of the Shenango Valley’s great coal barons, would become intimately connected with Sharpsville’s development, why did he choose what was at that time barely a town (and legally part of Hickory Township) as a terminus for the output from his mines is due to three factors: First, his foray into the iron- making that would both multiply his fortune and gain him renown was almost accidental: ownership of the Old Sharpsville Furnace came into his hands in 1859 as settlement for a coal debt. While he would not begin building additional blast furnaces until 1868, the original furnace here was a significant consumer of the block coal from the Pierce mines. Second, before the construction of railroads, the canal was the only means to traffic the coal beyond the Shenango Valley, with the nearest accessible section of the canal being at or near Sharpsville. (Even after the completion of rail links, the canal carried 30% of the shipments from the mines in Hickory Township.) Finally, Sharpsville is located downhill from Hermitage. The coal from Pierce’s mines in Hickory Township (now Hermitage) was initially carried by a tramway or “gravity railroad”. Gravity assisted its horse-drawn cars for the shipments into Sharpsville; the return journey uphill was with empty cars. Where this tramway met the canal boats is uncertain. It may have been where near where Pine Run (i.e., the creek that forms Pine Hollow) empties into the Shenango River, then the Slackwater segment of the canal.

This article is copyrighted and courtesy of Sharpsville Area Historical Society. If you would like more information on the Sharpsville Railroad, inquire at sharpsvillehistorical.org or attend one of their meetings.

Sharpsville’s major link to the outside world in its formative years was the Erie Extension Canal, also known as the Beaver & Erie Canal. But as the Canal Era gave way to the Age of Rail, so too did these linkages to the outside world. While “General” James Pierce, then one of the Shenango Valley’s great coal barons, would become intimately connected with Sharpsville’s development, why he chose what was at that time barely a town (and legally part of Hickory Township) as a terminus for the output from his mines is due to three factors: First, his foray into the iron- making that would both multiply his fortune and gain him renown was almost accidental: ownership of the Old Sharpsville Furnace came into his hands in 1859 as settlement for a coal debt. While he would not begin building additional blast furnaces until 1868, the original furnace here was a significant consumer of the block coal from the Pierce mines. Second, before the construction of railroads, the canal was the only means to traffic the coal beyond the Shenango Valley, with the nearest accessible section of the canal was at or near Sharpsville. (Even after the completion of rail links, the canal carried 30% of the shipments from the mines in Hickory Township.) Finally, Sharpsville is located downhill from Hermitage. The coal from Pierce’s mines in Hickory Township (now Hermitage) was initially carried by a tramway or “gravity railroad”. Its horse-drawn cars were assisted by gravity for the shipments into Sharpsville; the return journey uphill was with empty cars. Where this tramway met the canal boats is uncertain. It may have been where near where Pine Run (i.e., the creek that forms Pine Hollow) empties into the Shenango River, then the Slackwater segment of the canal.

This primitive arrangement, considered a “wonderful achievement” in its day and begun before 1860, was replaced in 1864 with a steam railroad—originally called the Keel Ridge Railroad. In 1866 it was formally organized as the Sharpsville & Oakland Railroad. (Oakland was a post-office in Hickory Township, near the line’s original terminus, which would later extend to New Wilmington.) Several spurs to the many coal mines in Hickory township were also constructed. The route approaching Sharpsville was also changed: The original Keel Ridgeline ran roughly parallel to the east side of South Walnut Street until it reached the Old Sharpsville Furnace. We can infer that the transfer point to canal boats was now at Lock No. 9 that stood near the Furnace. Because this route up Walnut Street involved a steeper grade and the number of rail-cars that could be pulled, the Sharpsville & Oakland was re-routed in 1869 so that it passed through what is now the Pierce Bluffs development and entered town along the high ridge along the Shenango River. This route can be seen at the beginning of the Trout Island Trail. The paved trail itself follows the line of the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad. The route of the Sharpsville & Oakland can be seen as it goes along the slow rise of the stone retaining wall to one’s right.

This link of the valuable block coal attracted outside interests, with Erie’s William L. Scott extending the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad to Sharpsville in 1864. The line largely followed the path of the Erie Extension Canal which its successor, the Pennsylvania Railroad, ended up buying in 1870. The collapse of the Canal’s viaduct over Elk Creek in Erie County the following year marked the end of traffic on the waterway’s full route. Suspicions over the rail line’s willful neglect that eliminated a competitor were described in 1888: “The railroad company continue to operate it until 1871 when the fall of the Elk Creek aqueduct in Erie County gave them an excuse for abandoning the enterprise, which no doubt considered worthy of a postcard and published around 1906, this scene shows a massive concrete culvert built-in 1898 over Pine Run (the creek that forms Pine Hollow). Over it ran the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad whose bed is now the Walking Trail. Regarded as an engineering marvel in its day, the 75-foot wide culvert was the first cement railroad bridge built by the sprawling Pennsylvania Railroad, just nine years after the first use of reinforced concrete in a San Francisco pedestrian bridge was the intention at the time of purchase.” Scott would go on to develop a number of commercial interests—22,000 miles of far-flung railroad lines, coal mines in four states, blast furnaces, and large property holdings in Erie—and acquire a vast fortune. This active business life was rivaled by a busy political career—mayor of Erie, Congressman, and a significant force in Democratic Party politics. Pierce and Scott were business partners: Pierce served on the board of the Erie & Pittsburgh, and Scott, in turn, was a shareholder in the Sharpsville & Oakland, as well as a partner in the Mt. Hickory Furnaces James Pierce and his son Jonas built here in 1868. A more personal relationship between the men is indicated when Scott was chosen as a pallbearer at James Pierce’s funeral.

While we think of Sharpsville as an iron town, during most of the 1860s, there was only one furnace—the Old Sharpsville (originally named the Blanche). After the Pierces built the Mt. Hickory Furnaces in 1868, they were quickly followed by the Allen, two Douglas stacks, two Spearman stacks, and the Ormsby. These furnaces consumed a portion of the Sharpsville Railroad’s coal shipments. The majority of the car-loads, however, would be sent over the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad to the port of Erie, whose docks were conveniently owned by William L. Scott. The Erie & Pittsburgh was thus the Sharpsville line’s only link to the outside world. One must assume that the arrangement contained sufficient mutual benefit, given the apparent harmony of Pierce’s and Scott’s relationship. Yet the underlying circumstances changed in the early 1870s. First, the Erie & Pittsburgh line was leased to the much larger Pennsylvania Railroad in 1870. Pennsylvania was from then on in charge of the operation of the railroad. Second, James Pierce died on December 2, 1874, with each of his varied business interests taken over by one of his five sons. Walter Pierce took charge of the railroad. While having worked for the Sharpsville Railroad since 1866, and served as a director since 1871, as a 34-year old man at the time of the dispute, he perhaps did not garner the respect earned by the prodigious business acumen and experience of his father, the “General”. Finally, the demand for coal suffered greatly with the Panic of 1873, followed by an interruption in supply during the coal miners’ Long Strike in 1875.

It should be mentioned that the Sharpsville & Oakland Railroad, an unincorporated association owned principally by the Estate of James Pierce—who had died intestate—was reorganized on March 3, 1876. The new corporation, the Sharpsville Railroad, or SRR, was under essentially the same directorship. The Pennsylvania and Erie & Pittsburgh will likewise be periodically referred to below as PRR and E&P. While a distinction will be made between the PRR as the operating entity and the E&P as the identification of the trackage, the distinction is not always possible; for the most part, they can be considered synonymous.) Much of the demand for the freight hauled on the SRR was thus subject to the vagaries of the coal market in Erie— both for use in Erie and for outbound shipment on the Lake. Consequently, the Sharpsville Railroad was motivated to find a link to the Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Meadville markets; they, however, could not do so until the Sharon Railway was extended through Sharpsville in 1875. (That railroad ran along the path of the canal from Sharon to near the present Kelly Road Bridge. After crossing the river, it linked up with the tracks of the larger Atlantic & Great Western system about a mile or two south of Transfer at a locale known as “Cape Horn”. The line later became part of the Erie system.) The Pennsylvania Railroad, on the other hand, was determined to maintain its monopoly on outbound shipments from the Sharpsville Railroad.

The opening move of the railroad war came in December 1875, when the SRR hauled a shipment bound for the Stewart Iron Company over the Sharon Railway. In order to reach the Sharon Railway, the SRR had to make a short jog using about 100 feet of E&P track, with the entrance and exit on either side of “Big Cut”. (Big Cut was where Mercer Avenue crossed the rail line, at the head of the present Trout Island Trail. When the rail line was closed, the Mercer Avenue bridge that once went over the tracks was filled in. It was so named because it required a large excavation from the hillside.) While this incidental usage had been allowed, without charge, for the Sharpsville Railroad to deliver coal to the furnaces in town, a link with a rival’s tracks would not be tolerated by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The claims and contentions are given in minute detail in 790 pages of legal testimony and exhibits published in a bound volume in 1878 as In the Common Pleas Court of Mercer County, Pa., in Equity, No 2 of August Term, 1876, The Pennsylvania Company, operating the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad, and the Erie & Pittsburgh Railroad Com’y, vs. The Sharpsville Railroad Com’y. The answers to questions, cross-examinations, and re-directs by the 36 witnesses called between September 21, 1876, and July 31, 1877, are surprisingly unilluminating as to the contending parties’ economic motives. Since the ostensible reason for the legal proceedings was to bar a proposed grade crossing on the east side of Big Cut as unsafe, most of the testimony deals with technical aspects of railroad switches and costs of trackage. The basic desire for the Sharpsville Railroad to have an alternative to sole reliance on the Erie & Pittsburgh line is stated by Walter Pierce. They need to free themselves from overreliance on the demand for coal at Erie is clear; it is uncertain, however, whether the E&P exercised any monopoly power in pricing. Also unsaid is whether the furnace owners at Sharpsville felt the need to break free of the E&P’s stranglehold, both for shipments of incoming ore and outgoing pig iron. (While not parties to the suit in equity, the Pierce family-owned majority stakes in both the Sharpsville Railroad as well as in most of the town’s furnaces, and so would have aligned interests.)

This map was an exhibit of the litigation and showed the past, present, and proposed rail lines referenced in the article. The Pennsylvania Railroad, when made aware of the SRR’s use of their tracks to access the line of a competitor, delivered a telegram to William L. Scott on December 28, 1875; this was followed by a meeting between the officers of the SRR and the PRR on January 4, 1876. The Pennsylvania men emphatically denied any right of passage on the E&P tracks that would divert business from them. Even though the travel was just a short distance, the SRR realized that their position was tenuous. The existing arrangement gave precedence to the E&P traffic, resulting in lengthy waits before the SRR cars could pass through. Now, it was feared that they would be physically barred from access to this section of the track. Their solution was to avoid this length of the E&P’s track and to directly connect the mainline of the SRR and a branch line within Sharpsville that allowed unimpeded access to the Sharon Railway. This connection would require a new grade crossing: basically, an intersection, between the SRR and the E&P. The need for a grade crossing was recognized as early as August 1875 with surveys made that month and the next. On October 2, 1875, this first proposal for a grade crossing was presented to the PRR. James D. Layng, general manager of that great rail system, however, flatly stated that would oppose it “by all means in his power.”Grade crossings do, understandably, increase the risk of a rail accident. Pennsylvania law generally disallows them where a crossing above or below grade (by means of a bridge) is reasonably practicable. This became the point of the suit, with the Pennsylvania Railroad seeking an injunction to stop the Sharpsville Railroad’s proposed crossing. The route for an overhead crossing proposed by the plaintiffs involved running the SRR’s approach into town further uphill toward the Riverside Cemetery and building a bridge over the E&P east of Big Cut. Because descent from this elevated bridge precluded following the existing turn by the Pierce House Hotel toward the Mt. Hickory Furnaces, the track would need to take a wide loop past Sixth Street in order to ultimately reach that destination. Considered the only “reasonably practical” route to avoid a grade crossing the proposed line was called the “Sixth Street Route”. The SRR argued not only the impracticality of these proposals but that both the pre-1869 crossing west of Big Cut and the current connecting switch east of the Cut were mutual agreements between the connecting lines. Even the wages of the switchman was divided equally between the SRR and the PRR. The decision of Common Pleas Court Judge A. McDermitt was to deny the PRR’s request for an injunction to prevent the SRR’s proposed grade crossing. In the ruling handed down until September 21, 1878, the judge noted that the grade crossing issue was a mere cover for the PRR’s desire to maintain their monopoly on connecting traffic from the SRR: “It was not until the Defendant sought transportation for their freight by a rival road that the Plaintiffs became frightened for the public safety.” The original connecting switch installed in December 1869 was used “without let or hindrance” until freight was taken over it “to a competitive Road of the Plaintiffs.” In ruling on whether avoiding the grade crossing would be reasonably practicable, he added two salient points. First, the estimated cost of $60,000 for the overhead crossing must be weighed against the size of the railroad; what would be practicable for a large system would be an undue burden for a short 16-mile line like the SRR. Moreover, the construction of the overhead crossing would require encroachment on the property of Riverside Cemetery, running about 1,000 feet through there and occupying about 10% of its land. The General Railroad Act of 1849 clearly forbade a railroad from “passing through any burying ground or place of public worship.” In this statute, and in subsequent case law, Judge McDermitt found the clear prohibition for even minimal encroachments upon cemetery land.

The Pennsylvania Railroad appealed the decision to the State Supreme Court. (Prior to the 1895 creation of the Superior court, there was no intermediate the appellate court in Pennsylvania.) Perhaps impatient with the slow pace of judicial proceedings Pennsylvania Railroad then sought to change the facts on the ground. On February 25, 1879, their workers pulled up the crossing’s frog (i.e., the Y-shaped rail that allows a connection) of the Sharpsville Railroad. This presaged the tearing up of tracks and scuffles that would occur here five years later. The Pierces, through their organ, The Sharpsville Advertiser, “inflaming headlines, denounces the act as a high-hand outrage” and claimed the jobs of 500 men in the local furnaces and mines were in jeopardy as this affected not just the link to the Atlantic & Great Western but local spurs to the furnaces in Sharpsville. By the following month, the blockade has been raised, allowing the operation of the mines and businesses connecting to it to resume. The SRR brought suit to establish the use of crossing switches and to require the PRR to replace the frog.

In the midst of all of this, the owners of the Sharpsville Railroad sought a second northern route and incorporated the Sharpsville & Lake Shore Railroad. The proposed route would follow the Shenango River upstream to Pymatuning Creek and then branch northwest to Kinsman, Ohio where it would connect to the Mahoning Coal Road’s line to the lake port of Ashtabula, Ohio. The path described would have for the most part paralleled the Atlantic & Great Western. While the new line does not appear that it would somehow have avoided the disputed crossing of the E&P, its mere threat may have been used as a bargaining chip. On the other hand, it may have been considered a hedge against any trouble the A&GW could stir up. An initial survey was completed on May 9, 1879, with a survey of a second southwesterly route starting along McCullough’s Run, and grading said to have begun by late June. Nothing indicates, though, any actual construction of a Sharpsville & Lake Shoreline. On June 10, 1879, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Sharpsville Railroad, with their right to cross the E&P affirmed. The costs of the litigation were to be divided equally between the parties. By July 24, newspapers reported that an “armistice has been declared between the warring railroad companies at Sharpsville”. With an unimpeded grade crossing built at some point in 1879, peace would last at least three years before the conflict would erupt again in our Second Railroad War.

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