Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 1 (1961).pdf/27

 20 gers were so conveyed, something of a record for so small a vehicle on one day and almost a century ago. By September 21 the grading had approached to within a mile and a half of Patchogue. As autumn passed on into late October, the railroad came close to Sayville and the grading work into Patchogue reached completion; Superintendent White announced to the newspapers that service would begin to Sayville "in a fortnight."

In the first week of December Jack Frost put an end to all grading operations for the winter, but on or about December 11 Superintendent White did inaugurate the service to Sayville station as planned. So pleased were the residents of the town at having the trains before winter closed in that on Sunday the thirteenth, a large group of townsmen joined fifty of the railroad's employees in erecting and completing an engine house all in one day. Work necessarily came to a halt during the coldest winter months, but in March the railroad resumed work on the road, and pushed it as fast as the ground would allow. Finally, on or about April 10, 1869 the line was completed to Patchogue. One would suppose that the completion of the main line would have occasioned some sort of celebration, but the event must have been a quiet and casual affair, for it passed unchronicled in any of the newspapers of the island.

The mere presence of the South Side RR was a stimulus to all the villages along the south shore from the very day that the road had been organized. In an age when railroad facilities were a prestige symbol for a town and meant the difference between isolation and partnership with progress, forward looking townsmen and merchants in every village took it upon themselves to initiate promotion campaigns and to offer tempting inducements to railroad boards of directors to extend to their locality.

As early as January 1867, long before the first tie had been laid, the citizens of Moriches held a meeting and voted to grant the right-of-way through their land to the company. Not to be outdone in generosity, the landowners near Sag Harbor offered the same inducement in March. To smooth the advance of the railroad legally, committees arranged for the presentation to the Legislature of bills authorizing extension of the road through the Towns of Brookhaven and Southampton, and offered to