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

The Lehigh Valley Railroad.

Some time about 1878 surveyors arrived to lay out a right of way for the Lehigh Valley Railroad through Metuchen.

The line ran through our house on Amboy Avenue.

One day a party of surveyors drove stakes on our property.

I and my younger brother, who at that time was in dresses, pulled up the stakes because we did not want any railroad running through our house.

The next day the surveyors came back and threatened me and my brother with dire punishment if we pulled up any more stakes, and to add force to their threats, actually began to hack at the corner of our house with a hatchet.

That gave us a good scare.

We never pulled up any more stakes.

Many a time since, when I was surveying myself, I have had occasion to anathematize the people who have pulled up stakes and moved boundary stones.

Later, when we had moved, and the actual construction of the railroad had commenced, we children were vastly interested in the process of excavating the red shale.

Where the Lehigh Valley Railroad passes the Reformed church the cut is quite deep.

When red shale rock is first cut through, the rock is hard enough to be cut with some difficulty with a pick.

With a pocket-knife it may be cut and carved about like soapstone.

The rock is run through and through with seams which divide it into rhombohedrons, or irregular cubes.

On exposure to the weather and the frost these irregular cubes divide and divide until they are as large only as a grain of corn and finally disintegrate into a stiff clay of which bricks may be made.

Most of the shale is brick-red but some is gray- ish or greenish.

At Menlo Park and at New Brunswick some of the seams in this shale are filled with thin sheets of metallic copper.

The gang of Italians who were doing the excavating went at the red shale with picks and shovels.

Occasionally the rock was blasted with nitroglycerine.

At this time Miss Edgar, who later became Mrs. James Grimstead, had a school in the Dutch Reformed lecture-room, which stood right near the new railroad cut.

One day a charge of nitroglycerine was set off. The rock flew up in the air and one piece came down through the roof of the lecture-room and demolished the seat of one of the little boys.

Men came running to see if anyone was hurt, but fortunately no one was.

Miss Edgar had made a practice of gathering the children about her at her desk when the noise of the blasting was going on, so the seat of the small boy was vacant at that time.

My father had drilled several wells into the red shale rock and had at depths of from fifty to one hundred feet gotten in most of them an inexhaustible flow of the best of water.

These wells were drilled the whole distance through the shale rock with an ordinary ship's auger. When the Lehigh Valley Railroad cut was made some of these wells and several ordinary wells went dry.

Water might flow a long way through the seams in the shale rock.