Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

Gravel Railroad.

In 1859 the New Jersey Railroad, later leased by the Pennsylvania Railroad, bought a tract of land at Bonhamtown containing a deposit of yellow gravel.

This gravel consisted of white quartz stones mostly as large as hickory nuts, these stones being stained a bright yellow by oxide of iron, or more specifically the hydrous ferric oxide, which is yellow, distinguished from the non-hydrous iron oxide, which is red.

The red shale and red gravel of the old red sand-stone formation is colored by the non-hydrous iron oxide.

If you take a piece of iron covered with yellow rust and heat it, not too hot, in the fire. the rust will turn red.

If you heat a shovelful of yellow gravel the stones become red.

The Railroad Company built a railroad from the main line at Amboy Avenue in Metuchen about three miles to the gravel pit.

A large part of the old railroad bank was made of this yellow gravel from Bonhamtown.

Our old house was near this junction of the gravel railroad.

Some of my earliest recollections are of the gravel train pulled by an old-fashioned, wood-burning locomotive. The smoke-stack of this locomotive was shaped like an inverted cone, and painted red. This single gravel track was used for years, and may be yet, as a siding for long freight trains which used to pull in there out of the way to let the more important passenger trains pass on the main line.

We used to have to listen to a deal of whistling from the side-tracked locomotives.

When I was a very little boy my father owned a large farm alongside the gravel track down on the south side of Metuchen.

At that point the track was in a cut. We children used always to run to the edge of the cut to see the locomotive.

A little south of our farm there were great piles of cordwood stacked along the track to be used for firing the engines. A number of old passenger cars had also been drawn up alongside of the track. The wheel trucks had been removed and the cars were occupied for many years by families of "immigrants,'' mostly of the Irish persuasion.

When raspberries and blackberries were ripe my father used to recruit groups of pickers from the
women and children of these car dwellers.

See what industry and thrift can do!

Many of the children of these car-dwellers even in my time were later the proprietors of stores and of businesses in Metuchen.

The springs of these old-fashioned passenger cars were made of great cushions of rubber.

We children used to get these pieces of rubber and with a jack-knife laboriously cut them into balls as large as baseballs.

We used to smooth them with a hot iron.

These balls were very heavy and could be knocked a prodigious distance. I remember that one day we children were boring a post hole in the sand in our back lot with a newly acquired post-hole borer.

We had a hole about three feet deep.

My sister Julia was throwing one of these heavy rubber balls into the air. It came down plumb on her nose. Her nose began to bleed and she began to bawl. She was a mistress at bawling.

I got mad at the rubber ball. Dropped it in the post hole and covered it up. I bet it is there yet.