?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(NEW YORK--LONG ISLAND.) Early engineering and survey book of the Long Island Rail Road. [84] manuscript pages of L.I.R.R. records, plus [107] pages of later manuscript memoranda. Folio, 13 x 8 inches, original 1/2 calf, worn but sound; occasional leaves torn or excised. Jamaica, NY, February 1836 to March 1837
The Long Island Rail Road was organized in June 1835, and soon acquired a line then under construction from Brooklyn to Jamaica which began service in February 1836. Their ultimate goal was to establish a line through central Long Island to Greenport on the north fork, not to serve the island's sparse rural population, but to offer connecting steamboat service to Boston. This volume contains a wide variety of memoranda relating to the railroad. It begins with two pages of diary-like entries from 8 February to 16 May, including discussion of the route for the new Williamsburg Branch (1 April) and reports on the contractors at Jamaica (4 and 11 May). It is followed by copies of 2 letters from the chief engineer regarding the delivery of railroad ties, 4 August 1836, then 6 pages of estimates for grade work on new lines to Jericho and Ronkonkoma. Next are three long draft letters from the engineering office, 22 pages in total, reporting in detail on three different routes which had been surveyed from Jamaica to Greenport, dated 4 November 1835, January 1836, and 19 September 1836, interspersed with 17 pages of estimates for grading each route. The following pages are mostly shorter letter copies and estimates. One oddity is a copy of a brief note from a 21-year-old military engineer named George Gordon Meade, acknowledging receipt of payment "of services rendered" to the railroad, 9 August 1836; he went on to fame as a leading Union general in the Civil War. Much of the correspondence is to or from chief engineer James Pugh Kirkwood (1807-1877), who we can presume was the original keeper of the book. The last half of the book was apparently used by several different owners who recorded property acquisitions and various memoranda, followed by a diary and accounts kept by teacher Peter J. Butler of Millburn, NJ from 1870 to 1872. This volume is a key primary source for the nation's oldest railroad operating under its original name, quite literally setting the course for routes traversed by millions of riders every month.
