- PUBLISHED BY N.Y., O. & W. RY.
The New York, Ontario and Western Railway, was a regional railroad founded in 1868. In 1866, the New York and Oswego Midland Railroad was chartered under the direction of Dewitt C. Littlejohn, who envisioned a railroad serving a direct connection from the docks opposite New York City to Lake Ontario at Oswego. Construction on the line north of Middletown began in 1868 and was completed in 1873. Branches were also constructed to Ellenville, Delhi and New Berlin, New York; a branch was begun to Auburn from Norwich, but it only was constructed to Scipio Center before being sold to the Utica, Ithaca and Elmira Railroad in 1876.
The pre-World War I period saw the heyday of “financial capitalism” in the United States: securities issues in particular and the investment banking business in general were concentrated in the hands of a very few investment bankers – of which the partnership of J. P. Morgan and Company was by far the largest and most prominent – who played substantial roles on corporate boards of directors. This form of association between finance and industry had costs: it created conflicts of interest that investment bankers could exploit for their own profit. It also had benefits, at least from the owners’ perspective: investment banker representation on boards allowed bankers to assess the performance of firm managers, quickly replace managers whose performance was unsatisfactory, and signal to investors that a company was fundamentally sound. The Morgan-dominated “money trust” thus filled an important monitoring role in the years before World War I. In 1910 to 12 the presence on one’s board of directors of a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company added about 30 percent to common stock equity value. The overwhelming proportion of this increase in value came from the fact that Morgan companies performed better than others similarly situated.
During the ill-fated “Morganization” of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (NH), the railroad acquired control of the O&W and installed NH president Charles Sanger Mellen as president for a year. Regulatory difficulties frustrated Mellen’s plans to barter the O&W to the New York Central Railroad for concessions elsewhere.
The 1940s saw a receding of passenger service. In the early years of the 1940s, the Summitville-Kingston branch was reduced to a Sundays and holidays, summer-only service. Improved highways ended the O&W’s passenger service to the resort areas of the lower Catskill Mountains (the “Borscht Belt”) and lightly populated portions of upstate New York, with the last train from Walton, New York to Weehawken operating in the summer of 1948. The bankruptcy court finally ordered complete abandonment, and the last freight train ran from Norwich to Middletown on March 29, 1957. Liquidation proceeded shortly thereafter. Three large scrap dealers bought the entire right-of-way from the bankruptcy court soon afterward, and removed nearly all of the rails and bridges in 1958 and 1959. All O&W assets were auctioned. It was the first notable U.S. railroad with its mainline entirely abandoned.
Rail historian George Drury later commented that the O&W “had always been sickly and should not have been built” at just “541 miles”.
This road really starts nowhere, goes nowhere, avoids all large industrial centers, and ends nowhere. When its anthracite mines folded up, the earnings of the road fell off so rapidly that serious financial difficulties soon developed …
August 1942 issue of Trains Magazine
The railroad’s W-in-O logo first appeared in 1892. There are a total of 29 postcards with the O & W logo in the series.
Sources: wikipedia New York, Ontario and Western Railway
This card: Dr. Alfred Lebbeus Loomis, who operated a small hospital and dispensary out of a rented house on West 38th Street in New York City, was afflicted with tuberculosis, a contagious bacterial infection that affects the lungs. He noticed that the disease was in remission after vacationing in the Adirondacks and became convinced that a prolonged dose of fresh mountain air and rigorous exercise and a healthy diet was the best way to handle the infection. In 1885, Loomis partnered with another physician, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, to open the first tuberculosis sanitarium in the US, the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake. But Loomis wanted a facility closer to New York City and acquired 192 acres of land in the Catskill Mountains for a tuberculosis sanitarium. J. Pierpont Morgan donated $85,000 to the effort. For Morgan, it was personal as his first wife, Amelia, died of tuberculosis just three months after their wedding. In early 1895, Loomis contracted pneumonia and, his body already weakened from tuberculosis, he died on 25 January.
Construction on the sanitarium started in January 1896 and the Loomis Memorial Sanitarium for Consumptives opened on 1 June and was formally dedicated in November. The facility included the Mary Lewis Reception Hospital with room for 70 patients, the Babbitt Memorial Laboratory, a recreation center, a firehouse, and a bakery. The Sanitarium held to its core the belief that natural nutrition, exercise, and fresh mountain air could cause tuberculosis to go into remission in its patients. On the property, patients played croquet and golf on well-landscaped and manicured grounds. The Sanitarium also pioneered the use of new treatments and methods of diagnosis for tuberculosis.
Treatment combined components of traditional Western medicine (allopathy) with those of homeopathy and eclecticism (botanical medicine). This integrative approach resulted in groundbreaking diagnosis and treatment protocols. It was here that X-rays and laboratory tests were first used in TB diagnosis, and the link between victims and consumption of unpasteurized milk from TB-infected cows was recognized. But the most striking advance in medical thought pioneered at Loomis was the concept of “auto inoculation,” later to become the field of immunotherapy, the idea that the best defense against disease is a strong offense mounted by the body’s own immune system. Based on Loomis’ personal experience living in the Adirondack wilds, auto inoculation was thought to be a byproduct of fresh air, clean water, regular exercise and healthy food. To that end, Loomis patients were required to grow much of their own food, do mental and physical work as illness permitted, sleep outdoors, either on porches or in lean-tos or tents, and stimulate their immune systems with herbs, especially echinacea.
The Boston Medical & Surgical Journal reported that by mid-1897, that there was a remarkable improvement in health outcomes in 60% of its cases with nine discharges. With the development of pneumothorax treatments that allowed the partial or complete collapse of a lung by the introduction of air into the pleural cavity, giving the lung a chance to rest and heal, treatment times were shaved in half to an average of 90 days.
By the turn of the 20th century, the Sanitarium had grown to twenty buildings including an observatory, four cottages, and doctor residences. The Great Depression took a toll on the facility’s finances, and by 1938, it was operating with a skeleton crew and had only a few patients. It was purchased by physical-culture faddist Bernarr Macfadden and formally operated until 31 July 1942. Sanitariums became obsolete when antibiotics proved effective in curing TB in the middle of the twentieth century.
The Loomis was gradually converted into a general hospital that served local residents and vacationers, reopening as the Loomis Hospital on 21 August 1951. The reception building became a 55-bed general hospital serving the Liberty area. When it, too, closed, the building operated until 1998 as an Anglican seminary, later purchased by Alan Gerry, an American billionaire and founder of Cablevision Industries. who resided on the grounds while beginning his storied career in electronics.
The hospital was demolished in late 2017 after being abandoned for 19 years.
Loomis’ dual legacy of healthy outdoor life and epicenter of contagion simultaneously attracted city dwellers and devalued real estate, setting the stage for hotelier fortunes.
Sources: If these walls could talk: Loomis Sanitarium Linda Drollinger, River Reporter, 30 August 2017; Abandoned Online
- ANNUAL SALT WATER DAY OUTING CONEY ISLAND SEPTEMBER 18, 1906
Jersey Wash Day, also known as Salt Water Day or Ocean Day, was an annual event held the second Saturday of August near Wreck Pond in Sea Girt. Sea Girt is a borough situated on the Jersey Shore, within Monmouth County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was formed as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on 29 March 1917. Farmers living twenty to thirty miles from Sea Girt came to the sea to spend a day bathing and celebrating. The tradition, begun before 1853, stopped around the 1930s. Wreck Pond is a tidal pond located on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Wall Township and the boroughs of Sea Girt, Spring Lake and Spring Lake Heights. The Wreck Pond watershed covers about 12.8 square miles (33 km2) in eastern Monmouth County. In recent decades, recreational activities have been limited to occasional crabbing by water pollution from stormwater runoff and the filling in of the lake from sedimentation causing beach closings.
On Friday 9 September 1898 the NY, O&W and the Iron Steamboat Company operated the annual Salt Water Day Excursion to Coney Island This ran direct to the famous Coney Island Iron Pier, passing in review of the US battleships and cruisers stationed at US Navy anchorage off Tompkinsville, allowing six hours on the World’s Greatest Playground. This card was clearly over-printed for the 1906 excursion on 18 September.
This card: In 1880, the New York, Ontario and Western Railway reached Purvis a hamlet in Sullivan County, New York, renamed Livingston Manor by the residents in 1882. Many of the railway company’s premier trains, such as the Livingston Manor Express, ended there. Passenger service ended in early September 1953,
undivided-back postcards 