Mary McTamaney

As we watched the news last week, we were was amazed at the speed with which the Francis Scott Key Bridge crashed down into the wide mouth of the Patapsco River, thus blocking the Port of Baltimore. A runaway cargo ship named the Dali, carrying a giant load of shipping containers, had the powerful weight to break a pier holding up the bridge and the massive truss bridge fell within a minute.

My first thought was to look out at our truss bridge across Newburgh Bay and have a flash of thoughts about its vulnerability. Then, I felt an odd gratitude that we have our two homely and mismatched parallel bridges. The closing of one wouldn’t (and hasn’t in the past) leave us stranded on each shore.

I listened as newscasters explained the scope of daily shipping in and out of Baltimore Harbor and the impact the harbor closure would have on so many commodities. We are never sufficiently impressed by American commerce until it is interrupted. One statistic they repeated on many channels was the fact that Baltimore is a leading transit point for the automobile industry. “Really?” I thought. Thousands of new cars moving by water from manufacturers to customers? Just how is that happening?

Living beside the freight railroad line that runs through Newburgh, I have seen cars being shipped past us for decades. Once it was new Fords riding north from the plant in Mahwah, New Jersey as well as steel automobile frames moving south from the Midwest to that same plant to be outfitted. It was amusing to see the frames one day and the finished automobiles the next as if the Mahwah auto workers could work with the speed of magic. With our neighbors, we would sit in our backyards and pick out the cars we liked and joke about mounting a big magnet crane to our hillside so we could pick off “our” cars as they rode by. Then the chance to watch them ended because of relentless vandalism and cars began to be shipped in covered car carriers that rock throwers and spray painters had a hard time reaching. No more could we pick out our favorite colors and models as the first “influencers” to tell our friends what the new models would be like.

The news from Baltimore that automobiles were inside many of the shipping containers that were aboard that giant container ship and so many other ships was surprising but made me remember that cars have long been shipped by sea and rail inside cargo containers. It is how Newburgh received its first automobiles too. A neighbor long ago described to us how he watched the very first automobile arrive in Newburgh. It came on a flatbed car on the Erie Railroad and was pulled down off the rail car and inspected with wonder by a crowd eager to understand how it worked. He told us that the automobile was put on a wagon and pulled by horses to a mechanic’s yard who then went over it with care for a day or so to learn how it worked before he could show the new owner how to start and drive it.

One of Newburgh’s earliest full-time automobile dealers, Archie Stewart, who founded the Broadway Garage, left us a great gift in the many home movies he took with his early movie camera. Those films can be seen a century later thanks to the work of local historian Joe Santacroce who edited and shared them online. Joe is the owner and manager of the great website, Newburgh History Blog. On it, you will find a section of videos including those filmed by Archie Stewart in the 1920s. One entitled “Buicks, Buicks, Everywhere” is a fascinating documentary Mr. Stewart made in the summer of 1928 when a trainload of new Buicks arrived at the Newburgh freight yards. Stewart had ordered them all for his customers at the Broadway Garage on the south side of Broadway just east of Mill Street near the Good Shepherd Church. Two dozen new Buicks in a variety of styles came in beside the big old Newburgh freight terminal on the south end of our shore and Buick Garage’s two mechanics unloaded them and drove them each off the loading dock after hand-filling water and gas into each after their long rail ride to Newburgh. The cars, like autos shipped today, were stacked inside boxcars on a system of steel racks and wires anchoring the wheels. The incomparably strong and skilled Mr. Art Murray was the lead mechanic who choreographed their unloading and – wait until you see the film footage – used a pump jack to pull the cars off the train by hand.

Today, in Baltimore and elsewhere, cars arrive by rail and by water and a fleet of fuel powered cranes and smaller loading vehicles push and pull them into position. As the massive container ship, the Dali, in Baltimore Harbor waits for the rescue of its cargo, it is so informative and so prideful to see how we handled things in “the old days” in Newburgh, New York.