Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 1 (1961).pdf/53

 38 increased gradually and this month it is nearly as great as it was during the first months of last year." Further testimony to the great crowds carried especially to Rockaway appears again in 1871.

One of the greatest stimuli to both passenger and freight traffic was the new city of Breslau, renamed Lindenhurst as of July 14, 1891. During 1861-69 a Mr. Wellwood bought up 5000 acres of farmland near Babylon and laid out the tract in 25 × 100-foot lots. In October 1869 he named the place "Breslau" and formed a partnership with Charles S. Schleier of Brooklyn and formerly of Breslau in Silesia. Together the men promoted lots and campaigned intensively among the Germans of the metropolitan area. By 1872 there were about 400 houses and a population of about 3500. All the building materials for Breslau had to be transported by rail over the South Side RR and these shipments formed the bulk of the freight traffic over the road.

Both Wellwood and Schleier organized giant free excursion rides to the new Zion in the wilderness and great crowds of Germans turned out for the free ride, music, beer and oratory. On April 18, 1870 the largest known excursion train in the history of Long Island ran from Bushwick to Breslau, consisting of twenty-one cars, sixteen of them gondolas provided with temporary seats and drawn by two locomotives. Two thousand men, women and children turned out for this giant excursion and danced and drank the day away while professional spielers extolled the virtues of the new metropolis and inveigled the unwary into investment.

By May and June 1870 we hear that the South Side had every available freight car in constant use hauling building materials for Breslau and other smaller growing communities along the line. Governor Hoffman of New York State himself laid the corner stone of the new Breslau on June 6, 1870.

Service all along the South Side line was fairly good. In the fall of 1867 when the road opened and during 1868, there were two trains a day each way. In 1869 this was increased to six trains a day, and in 1870 the heavy traffic warranted eight trains each way; in the 1871–72 season nine trains operated daily. Most of the trains ran through from South Eighth Street to Patchogue; passengers for Rockaway changed at Valley Stream, where a shuttle train waited to make the run down the penin-