Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 1 (1961).pdf/28

The Era of Expansion market railroad bonds to the amount of eight and ten thousand dollars per mile of road built.

During the winter months of 1867–8 rallies were held in the principal villages to whip up railroad enthusiasm and in April the three townships of Brookhaven, Southampton and Easthampton came through handsomely with generous offers of money and land. Brookhaven offered $68,000 and the right of way, Southampton $112,000 and the right of way, and Easthampton $25,000, a grand total of $205,000 toward the completion of about forty-five miles of road eastward from Patchogue to Sag Harbor. This generous offer was presented to the directors of the South Side RR at their meeting on April 6, 1868 and unanimously accepted.

With the coming of spring in 1869, it was reliably reported that the directors were about to build along the proffered right of way from Patchogue through Bellport, Brookhaven, and Moriches to Riverhead, the county seat. The inhabitants of Riverhead declared themselves ready to vote $25,000 or more to encourage the enterprise.

Whatever the reason, nothing so grandiose as a Riverhead extension took place over the summer, but in the fall of 1869 commissioners were appointed to appraise the damages to property for a four-mile extension from Patchogue to the neighboring village of Bellport, in the hope that construction could begin in the spring of 1870. The people of Moriches, at a public meeting, also took the occasion to appoint a committee to wait upon President Fox of the South Side RR to persuade him to build as far as Eastport, the easterly limit of the Town of Brookhaven. President Fox replied that the request would be favorably considered, provided the residents along the proposed extension would subscribe for $140,000 of the first mortgage bonds of the railroad. At a meeting of the directors on the twenty-second it was voted to make a survey of the road.

In January it was reported that the $140,000 of stock had all been taken by the residents of the various villages, and that the engineering survey was being pushed. Then, oddly enough, all talk of eastward extensions ceased, and we hear of no further attempts either on the part of the villages or the railroad to move eastward. It is difficult to see after the lapse of a century