by Peter F. Stevens

"Railroad" - the word has sparked debate in Dorchester since 1840. Today, a revamped proposal that the MBTA add more stops to the Fairmount commuter rail line to improve rapid access to downtown Boston for Dorchester residents has locals arguing the pros and cons.

In several ways, history is repeating itself. Similar animated arguments about "riding the rails" are a longtime Dorchester tradition.

Around 1840, talk that the Massachusetts legislature wanted to build a railroad line from Boston to Quincy "by any one of three routes passing through Dorchester" coursed from Savin Hill to the Neponset. While some residents viewed the "iron horse" as the future of transportation, others feared the price of progress.

Concerns that the Old Colony Railroad would destroy Dorchester's quality of life by transporting city-style crime to the community dominated the Town Meeting of February 3, 1842. As William Dana Orcutt notes, "it will undoubtedly be something of a surprise to many of Dorchester's present inhabitants to learn that the town was conservative enough in 1842 to make a strong objection to the 'modern' invention of railroads."

Colonel Walter Baker, of Baker Chocolate fame, served as moderator at the February 3, 1842, meeting, with Town Clerk Thomas J. Tolman signing the animated session's "true and attested copy." Even today, townspeople's objections that the railroad would shatter the town's quality of life appear much like the litany of anti-Greenbush Line sentiments voiced by many current South Shore residents.

Dorchester Town Clerk Tolman succinctly rendered his neighbors' anti-railway fears: "In the opinion of the inhabitants, the railroad petitioned for by Thomas Greenleaf and others, if located upon [any] of the lines designated upon their plan, will be of incalculable injury to the town generally, in addition to immense sacrifice of private property which will also be involved. A great portion of the road will lead through thickly settled and populous parts of the town, crossing and running contiguous to public highways, and thereby making a permanent obstruction to a free intercourse of our citizens from one part of the town to another, and creating great and enduring danger and hazard to all travel upon the common roads."

Proving the town's awareness that the state legislature could override any locals' concerns, Baker, Tolman, and other Dorchester citizens offered an alternative route: "If, in the opinion of the legislature, there can be shown sufficient evidence of public utility to justify taking of private property at all, for the construction of this projected railroad, it should be located upon the marshes, and over creeks bordering the harbor and Neponset River, and as remote as possible from all other roads; and by which a less sacrifice will be made of private property, and a much less injury occasioned to the town and the public generally."

Still, the Town Meeting quickly dispensed with the notion of "alternatives" or compromise. They resolved "that our representatives be instructed to use their utmost endeavors to prevent, if possible, so great a calamity to our town as must be the location of any railroad through it; and if that cannot be prevented, to diminish this calamity, as far as possible, by confining the location to the route herein designated."

The anti-railroad faction took another stand after the February meeting by appointing a legal team "to oppose the measure before the Legislature." In the state senate and house, Dorchester representatives "were instructed [by the Town Meeting] to use their utmost power to prevent the location of so dread an evil [as the Old Colony] within the Dorchester limits."

Local leaders contended that "the property and the comfort, and perhaps the lives, of their fellow-citizens were deeply interested in the result of their remonstrance, and that the expenses of the ablest counsel were not to be considered when such interests were at stake."

For two years, Dorchester fended off the shrill whistle blasts and telltale steam hisses of the railroad. Then, in 1844, another legislative petition for an Old Colony line along the "Dorchester to Quincy road" came before the politicians. Dorchester's railway foes went on the offensive again; this time, however, their campaign was doomed.

Orcutt writes: "Again the measure met the most violent opposition; but the success of the Boston and Albany [rail] road's 'through line to the West'…had so steeled the hearts of the legislators that all opposition was in vain." The railroad would run through Dorchester. The town's very topography, as well as life in general, was about to change as the Old Colony's first cartloads of wood, track, and steel clattered into town.

The Old Colony Railroad Corporation, chartered in March 1844 with assets of $1,000,000, initially built two steam railroads and a web of branch tracks in Dorchester. The rails and ties wound along a vista where "there were only two small houses at Savin Hill, easterly from the track…and only a few [homes] at what was afterwards called Harrison Square, and at Neponset "where there were no houses east of the Neponset Turnpike."

The Old Colony ushered in decades of profound change for the town.

Almost immediately the new lines lured prominent businessmen to Dorchester. Such entrepreneurs as Edward and Franklin King, A.T. Stearns, S.S. Putnam, and David B. Bartlett helped turn the "easterly part of town, including Harrison Square and Neponset," into a bustling commercial district. Serving as the first president of the Old Colony Railroad was Dorchester's Nathan Carruth.

From 1850 onward, the concerns of long-time residents that "old Dorchester" was slipping away materialized with the arrival and departure of each train, urban Boston steadily encroaching upon the once-pastoral town. The Old Colony, a historian states, signaled "the beginning of the end of Dorchester's independence."

By the onset of the Civil War, the community was becoming a de facto suburb of Boston as the tracks rising above Dorchester's marshes opened the town not only for city dwellers who worked there, but also for those who decided that they would like to live in Dorchester.

Renowned local historian and author Anthony Mitchell Sammarco states that the train had a key role in the annexation of Dorchester (1870) by Boston.

"The Old Colony Railroad made it possible for people to live here [Dorchester] in a suburban setting and commute to work in the city," he told the Boston Globe's Gail Ravgiala.

The impact of the railroad pitted the "new Dorchester" - affluent businessmen who had moved to the town with the Old Colony and pushed for annexation - against the old guard whose families had dwelled for centuries in the community and continued to battle for Dorchester's "freedom" from Boston. The newcomers would win.

The victory of the commercial forces, symbolized by the train, opened up the rails and the town itself to a wave of middle-class families and immigrants. Eventually, new homes including rows and rows of "three-deckers" were perched near the all-important train tracks. Old pastures, farms, and woodland gave way to new mansions and more modest homes alike, and the trains conveyed residents rich or poor to Boston and back.

By 1880, the Bird Street Station alone loaded six steam trains to Boston by 9 a.m. each day and nine outbound trains from mid-afternoon to early evening. A resident recalled that "you could get 14 tickets for a dollar, or a three-month season ticket for $12 to get you into or out of Boston….they were long trains -- six or more cars, packed to the limit with plenty of standees upon them." For several generations, the trains were a pivotal part of Dorchester's commercial lifeblood, as well as the way in which people without cars "got around."

Although most of the old rail beds gave way to the MBTA subway and bus lines, with regular passenger service on the Dorchester Branch of the New York and New England Railroad ending in 1944, 1979 brought a return of limited service on the Fairmount Branch. Known also as the Midlands or Dorchester Branch, the route cuts through many Dorchester neighborhoods, but stops only at two local stations, the poorly maintained Uphams Corner and Morton Street Stations.

A plan for the proposed Indigo Line "for improved service and greater utilization of the Fairmount Branch" is drawing increasing scrutiny from the MBTA and from neighborhood groups such as the Four Corners Action Coalition.

While the proposal "of adding more stops to the Fairmount commuter line, creating a quick pipeline to downtown for Dorchester residents," has simmered for several years at least, the issue has grown hotter in 2000. Nearly 150 years since the debate over locomotives first hit the old Town Meetings, Dorchester's colorful, sometimes controversial ride on history's train rails continues.

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48,Brassey's, now in paperback, and Notorious and Notable New Englanders, Down East Books.)