Page:Vincent F. Seyfried - The Long Island Rail Road A Comprehensive History - Vol. 2 (1963).pdf/147

 Collapse of the Poppenhusen System resulting in a loss of two to three million dollars. The next blow had been the inroads of the White Line; up to that time the North Side system had paid very well, but now it fell behind $150,000 to $200,000 a year. Mr. Poppenhusen never allowed the reputation of his roads to suffer. He met every obligation out of his own money. When he purchased the Southern R.R., he incurred further huge losses in his zeal to bring that road up to the standards of the rest of the system. To his great disappointment and surprise, the Southern also failed to earn its running expenses. When Mr. Poppenhusen purchased the Long Island, he increased the service on all the roads and failed to lop off duplicate trackage. The number of trains was at no time justified by the traffic and this involved further losses.

The prospect of ruin drove Mr. Poppenhusen to Germany every year to raise money, while his son Adolf was left in charge of financial matters with power of attorney. Adolf raised large sums by the assignment of mortgages, and this was used to meet the paper already afloat. Both Conrad and Adolf began to assign mortgages even on their own real estate holdings in College Point, and friends and neighbors were prevailed upon to accept the Poppenhusen holdings. So it came about that Hermann Boker, the hardware wholesale dealer; Hermann Funke, Boker's wealthy general manager; the firm of Victor & Achelis, dry goods importers; William Pauly, superintendent of the hard rubber comb department; Frederick Koenig, brother-in-law of Conrad, and others of the College Point aristocracy became creditors of the Poppenhusens. Even Conrad's sister, Caroline C., and Alfred T. and Hermann C., his two sons, pledged their real estate holdings to help their father.

In the end it was all in vain. It was perhaps the Central R.R. that really dragged down the whole system by superimposing the final crushing burden. The Central touched only three villages of importance, Flushing, Hempstead and Babylon, and all three were already served by rival roads. Even Garden City, the village for which the road had been designed and built, contributed nothing. The place had no inhabitants at all until the spring of 1874, when Stewart felt himself ready to open the hotel and rent some of the houses, and thereafter there were almost no year-round inhabitants. The road had been built to the