Friends of White Clay Creek State Park

Tracking the “Pumpsie Doodle” Along White Clay Creek

by Debbie Paruszewski Keese

[Excerpted from Current Research on the Pomeroy and Newark Railroad]

Special Newsletter Supplement - Friends of White Clay Creek State Park (FWCCSP RECORD, Vol. 6, No. 1, May 2003, p. 9)

NEWARK CENTER STATION. Newark Center Station was a complex of buildings located between Main Street and the old Newark Agway Building. In 1887, the Station agent for Newark Center was Samuel J. Wright. The passenger station was positioned on the north edge of Main Street on the line. It was removed some time after 1928 when passenger service was discontinued. The Newark freight station sat roughly where the Agway building stood, with the tracks on the east side of the building. Beyond the freight house, a crane housing was installed, and north of the crane was a warehouse and office building. The old rails can still be seen today crossing Main Street. A hint of the old rail bed is visible in a gully running between the old Agway and the Newark Shopping Center parking lot. In 1932, the commodity delivered in greatest quantity to the Newark station was coal, followed by fuel oil, and then pulp wood from among a total of 27 different inbound products. The greatest outbound commodity shipped from Newark was paper, followed by canned goods, fibre, and clay, from among a total of 10 products.

As the train continued north from Newark and into the White Clay Valley, it made four stops at various sidings before arriving at Tweed Station A siding west of the line at Creek Road went to Atlantic Refining Company. A siding on the east side at this point went to the NVF company.

TWEED STATION. The line proceeded down the east side of the creek to a spot adjacent to Wedgewood Road. This stop was called Tweed Station. A 1909 timetable listed Tweed as a freight stop which “stops only on notice to conductor or agent or on signal." A building was never constructed at this stop. It was directly across the creek from the location of historic Tweed's Mill on Creek Road at Wedgewood Road. This mill was purchased by William McClelland in 1834. McClelland acquired all of the land between the mill and New London Road and created a road between them to provide access to the mills. At the intersection with New London Road, a small hamlet developed, called McClellandsville. By the late 1860s it had a post office, a store, a wheelwright and blacksmith shop, a church, a school, and five dwellings. Richard Edward’s 1880 “Industry of Delaware” describes McClellandsville as having “a Post Office, and a station on the Pennsylvania and Delaware Railroad, two miles north of Newark. It is a thriving, growing place with a church, an hotel, a large carriage shop, several stores, and a population of more than 150 with the prospects of becoming quite a place.”

In 1880, Mansell Tweed converted the bark mill into a flint mill that produced six tons per day and employed eight men. Flint, (ground quartz) was used in the porcelain industry. It is possible that Mansell Tweed’s ground flint product was transported on the Pomeroy railroad. A Pennsylvania Railroad timetable of 1887 lists the Tweed stop as “M. Tweed” and as an individual siding, as was F.F. Armstrong, W. Dean, and S.B. Wright at Newark Center. This suggests that freight was delivered or loaded at Tweed just as it was at these other locations. A bridge over the creek at Wedgewood road connected McClellandsville and the mill to the rails on the east side of the creek. Another road was built on the east side of the creek connecting the station to Milford Crossroads, a major intersection on the road from Newark to Limestone Road. This provided access to rail transport for passengers and industrial enterprises along major roads from both the east and west.

THOMPSON STATION. Thompson Station was located west of the creek, just south of Chambers Rock Road. It is listed by Richard Edwards (1880) as being "4 miles north from Newark, on the Pennsylvania and Delaware Railroad and is a postal station with a population of 15 or 20 families, with the usual ambition of being a city." The 1899 Biographical and General History of Delaware describes it as "a village of some 30 to 40 inhabitants, a station on the Pomeroy and Newark Railroad." The station was named after the Thompson family, who owned the farmland on which the station was built. Right -of- way access across the Thompson farm was granted by Joel Thompson Jr. and his wife, S. Cornelia Thompson, to the Pennsylvania and Delaware Railway Company for $400 on July 23, 1873. Terms of the indenture included an agreement that the railroad company would construct and maintain a station house and side track and erect and maintain a lawful fence on the line. Mr. Thompson agreed to provide a public road about 270 feet long and 30 feet wide extending from the County Road to the Depot grounds. This road was to be kept open and maintained as a county road. Today, the only trace of Thompson Station that can be detected is this road.

Mr. Eugene Robinson (personal communication, 2002) remembers the barn-like building as one and one half stories high and rectangular in shape, approximately 55 feet long and 35 feet wide. Thompson Station was strictly a freight station. It is possible that this changed at some point, because Mr. Norman Dempsey (personal communication, 2003) a farmer in the Corner Ketch area, remembers a passenger ticket window at the station. Mr. Dempsey often accompanied his father, also a farmer, to the station, when they were notified that their freight had arrived.

Thompson Station served as a depot for shipping the products of local industry out to market and for delivery of supplies and fuels to support those industries. In 1932, Thompson Station shipped out 500 tons of clay on 14 cars and 80 tons of walnut logs on 4 cars. Delivered to the station were 477 tons of manure, 156 tons of lime, 97 tons of coal, and 80 tons of stone. There was apparently an established walnut logging enterprise on a nearby farm to supplement the agricultural activity. The clay came from the Newark China Clay Company operating nearby at Pleasant Hill. After the clay was quarried and processed, it was loaded onto small trucks and transported to the station by the quarry workers. The trucks would be backed up to a freight car, where the clay was unloaded and packed efficiently into the space. Once Thompson Station was closed in 1939, the clay was trucked to the Newark Center Station.

A newspaper article of 8-24-1875 reports an accident at Thompson Station. "As the train approached Thompson Station, the engineer saw a yoke of oxen on the track 200 yards ahead of the engine. He whistled down the brakes, but running at a rate of 30 mph, he could not get the train stopped in time. The train struck the oxen, carried them about 100 yards and threw them one to each side of the train, killing them instantly. Two coal cars were thrown off the track, one empty one, breaking and bending up 8 rails and a number of ties. Fortunately, the engine and passenger cars remained on the track. Next morning, the track was cleared in 4-5 hours. The oxen belonged to M.J. Chambers and were let out of the field by a wild steer running in the neighborhood."

A newspaper reporter wrote a flowery description of the White Clay Creek valley from his vantage point aboard the Pumpsie Doodle in 1873. He observed that the stream seemed to run "across itself about three times in a mile. It's beauties are of the retiring kind and dawn on you around projections of rock, and disclose themselves up shady vistas of hilly streets and in many a shady nook by the meandering brook where the gentle zephyrs play." Hopefully, the ruins and the stories associated with the old Pomeroy Railroad will live on in our memories and be shared with those to come after us.