Lecture describes history of Orange County's trolleys

GOSHEN — A crowd of about 60 gathered recently to hear Ray Kelly’s presentation on the history of electric-powered trolleys in Orange County (horse-drawn cars set on narrow tracks existed prior to the 1890s in Newburgh and most American cities.)

Sponsored by the Friends of the Goshen Public Library and Historical Society, this slide show and lecture focused on the Newburgh and Middletown systems. Initially they competed only with railroads. Their heyday was from the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s, when automobiles and buses put them out of business. Today some of their power plants, car barns, rails, and bridges still exist in Orange County, as documented in Ray Kelly’s slides.

Trolley companies created amusements parks at key points on their lines to attract weekend riders when otherwise the cars would have had little use. The Newburgh trolley company picked up hundreds of passengers debarking from steamships that had come up the Hudson River from New York City and conveyed them to a large amusement park at Orange Lake in the Town of Newburgh. Newspapers of that day proudly proclaimed summer weekend attendance figures of 40,000 people. The Middletown trolley company took passengers to another amusement site, Mid-Way Park, located on the midpoint of the route from Middletown to Goshen. It claimed peak summer weekend patronage of 20,000 people. The line to Goshen ended near the site of the former Erie Railroad Station in Goshen, which now houses the Goshen Police Department.

Ray Kelly said that initially in the 1890s the Goshen merchants opposed the link with Middletown, fearing that Goshen residents would simply pay the 15-cent fare and ride to Middletown to do their shopping. Apparently that did not happen, because in the 1920s those same merchants opposed the shutting down of the trolley line.

At a time before widespread ownership of private cars, the existence of good roads, and the invention of air conditioning and television, a day-long family outing at an amusement park via a ride on a trolley must have been almost irresistible.

For more information on future presentations, go to goshenpubliclibrary.org.

Contributed by Jim Tarvin