Trains were the spark of life in Rowley

Trains once linked Rowley to Newburyport, Portsmouth, Portland, Salem, Lynn, Boston and beyond, where a network of trolley cars and other public transportation modes served travelers.

The railroad served Rowley beginning with steam locomotives in 1840.

Rowley's seniors paint a vivid portrait of bustling commerce centering around the town's East End.

Doris Fyrberg remembers shopping trips with her mother to Boston and Newburyport, where taxis cost 25 cents.

"Seems to me a lot more was going on back then than there is now," said William Mehaffey Sr. "Now they roll the sidewalks up at night."

Mehaffey, who grew up downtown, worked in the post office during the 1950s. Almost everyone on Railroad Avenue, a street laid out by the B&M railroad, worked for the railroad. "If they didn't do that, they went clamming," he said, "or worked at the shoe shops."

Part-way between Boston and Portland, Rowley was home to railroad workers like engineers Bill Dow, his son Eddie and fireman Ivorn Worthley.

Bill Webber, the engineer on the non-stop Portland Night Express, would toot to his wife as he sailed past their house on Railroad Avenue. Others included station agent Frank Fletcher; Ed Hamilton, who worked the tower in Boston; electrician Wally Allen; dispatcher Louie Henderson; and Jesse Frances, a member of the section crew maintaining the local track.

A large freight house stood at the site of today's platform. "You wouldn't believe the freight," said Mehaffey. Everything moved by train before trucks took over: ice, milk, grain, manufactured goods from the shoe industry, and even gladiolas to the Boston flower market.

Doug Jewett coordinated shipments of government-subsidized lime to farmers. Mehaffey, as a young man, worked at the Tenney Farm on Newbury Road. He remembers loading with Harrison Tenney, 2 1/2 tons of lime in hundred-pound bags on the back of his 1930 Model-A truck - four trips worth.

He said trains were fast on mail delivery. A letter delivered from the Rowley Post Office to Ipswich went in an outgoing mail bag. For an express train, the bag was hung from a long swing-arm near the track. The crew used a hook to pluck it off. On the train, postal workers sorted mail from Portsmouth on down. Within the same hour, the letter was in the hands of its Ipswich recipient.

The milk train stopped every morning at 5:19, said Bill and Bob Todd. Their forebears' farm operated until 1920 on Main Street. Milk was brought to the station by horse and wagon and shipped to the Hood bottling plant in Lynn, said Bill Todd.

Fletcher, also a Rowley selectman, "loved kids, said Bob Todd. "He would weigh all the kids on the (freight) scale." Fletcher always did at least three things at once; sold tickets, checked baggage and tapped out messages on the teletype, said Mehaffey.

During World War II, said Bill Todd, curtains on the ocean side were drawn at night so German U-boats wouldn't see the train and shell it.

Rowley taxi service began with horse-drawn carriages run by John Boynton. In the early 1920s taxis were operated by Bennett Boynton and Raymond Grady.

In the '30s, Hosandra "Hosie" Hammett ran a 1929 Packard that held seven people. The MacDonald brothers ran taxis in the '40s and '50s, and Everett Hiller from the early '50s until train service stopped.

John Grundstrom of Railroad Avenue told how young Eddie Blaisdell flew down his driveway on a sled right underneath Hammett's taxi and right out the other side, unscathed.

There were three stations on Railroad Avenue, all of which burned. An article from "Rowley Revisited," by Willard Jewett, gives June 22, 1889 as the date the first station burned before the bucket brigade could reach it.

Arthur Gordon, 88, said he was there the day the second one burned one Saturday morning in 1925. Some accounts say 1929, but Gordon, as a member of the volunteer fire department, remembers running to the fire on a path along the marsh from his home on Hammond Street. He said a workman's car on a siding served as a temporary station until the new station was dedicated in 1930, which cost $6,500 to build.

After being abandoned, it burned on Easter Sunday, April 1976.

"It's nice to see commuter service come back," said Gordon. "It will save on a lot of wasted gas and people sitting on the train can ride with no cares."

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