Carleton Watkins Steamship Crescent City
cheapest and most direct route would have been via steamboat on the Hudson River from the ship landing at Catskill-on-Hudson over the Catskill mountains ninety miles due east of Oneonta via the Charlotte Turnpike. However, in the winter of 1849 the steamboat operators agreed that the season of navigation on the Hudson River would reopen on March 19,[8] four days after the Crescent City was scheduled to depart, which apparently foreclosed taking the shortest and easiest route from Otsego County to New York City via the Hudson River. However, mild weather in March[9] opened the way for stagecoach traffic to the bridge over the Hudson River between Waterford and present-day Troy, north of Albany, to the terminus of the Western Railroad on the east side of the river at present-day Rensselaer, New York [Fig. 4b].
The group's departure from Oneonta did not happen before March 10, 1849, when Collis in Oneonta signed legal documents with his brother, Solon.[10] The six Oneontans hit the road sometime between March 11 and 13 packed into one of Uncle Hezekiah's Concord Stage coaches for the nine or ten hour journey to Rensselaer passing through the villages of Schenevus, Cobbleskill and Schoharie (among others), as well as the state capitol, Albany.[11] From Rensselaer the group continued on the Great Western Railroad three hours to Springfield, where they transferred to the New Haven, Hartford and Springfield Railroad, traveling another three hours to New Haven, then five hours more by steamboat to Peck Slip in lower Manhattan, where the Steamship Crescent City cast off precisely at 1:40 p.m. on Wednesday, March 15, 1849.[12] The temperatures that day in New York City were between thirty-two and thirty-five degrees, the wind was from the northeast, and snow mixed with sleet was falling.[13]
The passenger manifest for the March 15 voyage of the Crescent City, lists the names of six men from Otsego County. The three senior members of the party were Collis Huntington, Daniel Hammond, and George Murray,
[8] Noble E. Whitford, History of the Canal System of the State of New York, Albany: Brandow Printing Company, 1906, p. 1060. With thanks to Craig Williams, New York State Museum.
[9]It was clear 17 days, cloudy 13 days, rainy 2 days, and both rainy and snowy 2 days. The coldest day that month was March 4 (7 degrees) and the warmest was March 31 (58 degrees). With thanks to Shawn Purcell, New York State Library.
[10] James Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994, p. 16.
[11] J. H. Colton, ed., Colton's Guidebook Through the United States of America and the Canadas, New York: J. H. Colton, 1851, p. 62
[12] George Murray to Solon Huntington, autograph letter signed, with separate paragraphs written between March 15 and March 24, 1849 (HEH 896)
[13] New York Tribune, May 3, 1849, p. 4 (Meteorological Report for the Month of March).