At last, the most modern method of public transportation was coming to the Twin Cities. It was July of 1881 when Lewiston granted rights to build a horse railroad in certain streets. Construction of the first routes of the Lewiston and Auburn Horse Railroad Co. went rapidly as track on Lisbon and Main streets was laid with old rail, and before long the great day dawned in which the first car was to run on rails in L-A.
That day was recalled by an unnamed writer who told the story in the April 27, 1912, edition of the Lewiston Evening Journal. He remembered that day 30 years earlier when “the first car was to come from Auburn, loaded deep with city officials.” He noted that the Twin Cities of the 1880s still had “to a much larger degree than now, the old-fashioned rural touch,” and the populace “was greatly stirred at the impending event.”
The welcoming crowd gathered mostly at the head of Lisbon Street to see that first car.
“And what a sight,” the writer exclaimed. Although loud cheers went up, the reporter was unimpressed at the car’s arrival.
“Instead of the nobby (meaning fashionable) cars that had been expected, there came into view an old round top yellow van on wheels that looked as though it were taken from the junk pile of another line. However, it moved and evidently had a being, and the faces of the city fathers shone through the window thereof, and it circulated wherever the rails permitted, drawn by good-looking horses, and everywhere greeted by cheers. Lewiston and Auburn seemed satisfied, for were they not almost the first city in Maine to have horse cars?”
The story credited the horse cars as being a great convenience, particularly in stormy weather. They ran half-hour trips with reasonable regularity. The writer quipped that “in the case of the horse, the power is not apt to be turned off, nor the trolley slip, or anchor ice bother the locomotion.” Apparently, those were problems with the later electric trolley lines.
“In the early days of the street cars, therefore, no attempt was made to run after snow began to fall heavily,” the account explained. “The service was then performed by little sleigh cars that seated eight passengers, at first drawn by one horse and later by two horses.”
Within months of the line’s inauguration, rumors were flying that the Horse Railroad Co. had secured land on the side of Lake Auburn and it would extend the tracks and open a lakeside resort.
“Up to that time, Lake Auburn was practically unknown to the city residents. No one went there,” the writer said.
Frank W. Dana, the firm’s president, was responsible for this project, the story said. “It was the wisest thing yet done for the welfare of the road.”
The extension opened in 1884 and became an immediate success.
There were many tales of the difficulties passengers endured because of the crowds aboard the cars after visits to Lake Grove. It’s said many people walked home after midnight. Others rode home on top of the trolley cars, or by “hanging on by the fingernails and toenails.”
The article describes one attempt to remedy the situation and serve more passengers. President Dana bought a so-called double-ended steam-powered dummy engine geared to take the grades while pulling several cars. The reporter said he and Dana set out early on morning on a test run aboard the “nondescript locomotive” that had been purchased from “an interurban road somewhere in Massachusetts.”
Dana and the writer, as well as an engineer, decided their test run from the car barns near the Burnham-Morrill corn shop on French Street, Auburn (now Lake Auburn Avenue) should be to the lake, and then back for a short run through Lewiston.
“Just beyond the corn shops there is a deep hollow and a sharp ascent on the farther side,” the account said. “Putting on full head, we dashed down the decline, the engine rocking and swaying perilously on the uneven rails. The sharp rise on the farther side took hold of the engine tremendously” and it failed to negotiate the rise. Same problem trying to back up over the other rise, the reporter said.
“So there we were, like a bug in a bowl,” he wrote. “Finally, by blocking the wheel on the rise and working her inch by inch, we managed to get back into the barn.
So ended the dummy engine experiment, with Dana declaring, “I wouldn’t ride 50 feet further in that machine for $5,000.”
Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached at [email protected].
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