Sussex Railroad Co. signed by Peter Cooper - Transfer of Stock Receipt

Stock signed by Peter Cooper. Rare! Nice! Portrait and biography included.

Peter Cooper (February 12, 1791 – April 4, 1883) was an American industrialist, inventor, philanthropist, and politician. He designed and built the first American steam locomotive, the Tom Thumb, founded the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and served as the Greenback Party's candidate in the 1876 presidential election.

Cooper began tinkering at a young age while working in various positions in New York City. He purchased a glue factory in 1821 and used that factory's profits to found the Canton Iron Works, where he earned even larger profits by assembling the Tom Thumb. Cooper's success as a businessman and inventor continued over the ensuing decades, and he became the first mill operator to successfully use anthracite coal to puddle iron. He also developed numerous patents for products such as gelatin and participated in the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

During the Gilded Age, Cooper became an ardent critic of the gold standard and the debt-based monetary system of bank currency, advocating instead for government-issued banknotes. Cooper was nominated for president at the 1876 Greenback National Convention, and the Greenback ticket of Cooper and Samuel Fenton Cary won just under one percent of the popular vote in the 1876 general election. His son, Edward Cooper, and his son-in-law, Abram Hewitt, both served as Mayor of New York City.

Peter Cooper was born in New York City of Dutch, English and Huguenot descent, the fifth child of John Cooper, a Methodist hatmaker from Newburgh, New York. He worked as a coachmaker's apprentice, cabinet maker, hatmaker, brewer and grocer, and was throughout a tinkerer: he developed a cloth-shearing machine which he attempted to sell, as well as an endless chain he intended to be used to pull barges and boats on the newly completed Erie Canal (which was routed west to east across upper New York State from Lake Erie to the upper Hudson River) which its chief supporter, the Governor of New York, De Witt Clinton approved of, but which Cooper was unable to sell.

In 1821, Cooper purchased a glue factory on Sunfish Pond on east side Manhattan Island for $2,000 at Kips Bay, where he had access to raw materials from the nearby slaughterhouses, and ran it as a successful business for many years, producing a profit of $10,000 (equivalent to roughly $200,000 in 21st century value today) within 2 years, developing new ways to produce glues and cements, gelatin, isinglass and other products, and becoming the city's premier provider to tanners (leather), manufacturers of paints, and dry-goods merchants. The effluent from his successful factory eventually polluted the pond so much that in 1839 it had to be drained and backfilled for eventual building construction.

Having been convinced that the proposed Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would drive up prices for land in Maryland, Cooper used his profits to buy 3,000 acres (12 km²) of land there in 1828 and began to develop them, draining swampland and flattening hills, during which he discovered iron ore on his property. Seeing the B&O as a natural market for iron rails to be made from his ore, he founded the Canton Iron Works in Baltimore, and when the railroad developed technical problems, he put together the Tom Thumb steam locomotive for them in 1829 from various old parts, including musket barrels, and some small-scale steam engines he had fiddled with back in New York. The engine was a rousing success, prompting investors to buy stock in B&O, which enabled the company to buy Cooper's iron rails, making him what would be his first fortune.

Cooper began operating an iron rolling mill in New York beginning in 1836, where he was the first to successfully use anthracite coal to puddle iron. Cooper later moved the mill to Trenton, New Jersey on the Delaware River to be closer to the sources of the raw materials the works needed. His son and son-in-law, Edward Cooper and Abram S. Hewitt, later expanded the Trenton facility into a giant complex employing 2,000 people, in which iron was taken from raw material to finished product.

Cooper also operated a successful glue factory in Gowanda, New York that produced glue for decades. A glue factory was originally started in association with the Gaensslen Tannery, there, in 1874, though the first construction of the glue factory's plant, originally owned by Richard Wilhelm and known as the Eastern Tanners Glue Company, began on May 5, 1904. Gowanda, therefore, was known as America's glue capital.

Cooper owned a number of patents for his inventions, including some for the manufacture of gelatin, and he developed standards for its production. The patents were later sold to a cough syrup manufacturer who developed a pre-packaged form which his wife named "Jell-O".

Cooper later invested in real estate and insurance, and became one of the richest men in New York City. Despite this, he lived relatively simply in an age when the rich were indulging in more and more luxury. He dressed in simple, plain clothes, and limited his household to only two servants; when his wife bought an expensive and elaborate carriage, he returned it for a more sedate and cheaper one. Cooper remained in his home at Fourth Avenue and 28th Street even after the New York and Harlem Railroad established freight yards where cattle cars were parked practically outside his front door, although he did move to the more genteel Gramercy Park development in 1850.

In 1854, Cooper was one of five men who met at the house of Cyrus West Field in Gramercy Park to form the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, and, in 1855, the American Telegraph Company, which bought up competitors and established extensive control over the expanding American network on the Atlantic Coast and in some Gulf coast states. He was among those supervising the laying of the first Transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858.

In 1840, Cooper became an alderman of New York City.

Prior to the Civil War, Cooper was active in the anti-slavery movement and promoted the application of Christian concepts to solve social injustice. He was a strong supporter of the Union cause during the war and an advocate of the government issue of paper money.

Influenced by the writings of Lydia Maria Child, Cooper became involved in the Indian reform movement, organizing the privately funded United States Indian Commission. This organization, whose members included William E. Dodge and Henry Ward Beecher, was dedicated to the protection and elevation of Native Americans in the United States and the elimination of warfare in the western territories.

Cooper's efforts led to the formation of the Board of Indian Commissioners, which oversaw Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy. Between 1870 and 1875, Cooper sponsored Indian delegations to Washington, D.C., New York City, and other Eastern cities. These delegations met with Indian rights advocates and addressed the public on United States Indian policy. Speakers included: Red Cloud, Little Raven, and Alfred B. Meacham and a delegation of Modoc and Klamath Indians.

Cooper was an ardent critic of the gold standard and the debt-based monetary system of bank currency. Throughout the depression from 1873 to 1878, he said that usury was the foremost political problem of the day. He strongly advocated a credit-based, Government-issued currency of United States Notes. In 1883 his addresses, letters and articles on public affairs were compiled into a book, Ideas for a Science of Good Government.

Cooper was encouraged to run in the 1876 presidential election for the Greenback Party without any hope of being elected. His running mate was Samuel Fenton Cary. The campaign cost more than $25,000. At the age of 85 years, Cooper is the oldest person ever nominated by any political party for President of the United States. The election was won by Rutherford Birchard Hayes of the Republican Party. Cooper was surpassed by another unsuccessful candidate, Samuel J. Tilden of the Democratic Party.

In 1813, Cooper married Sarah Bedell (1793–1869). Of their six children, only two survived past the age of four years: a son, Edward and a daughter, Sarah Amelia. Edward served as Mayor of New York City, as would the husband of Sarah Amelia, Abram S. Hewitt, a man also heavily involved in inventions and industrialization.

Peter Cooper's granddaughters, Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Amy Hewitt Green founded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, then named the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, in 1895. It was originally part of Cooper Union, but since 1967 has been a unit of the Smithsonian Institution.

Cooper was a Unitarian who regularly attended the services of Henry Whitney Bellows, and his views were Universalistic and non-sectarian.

Cooper had for many years held an interest in adult education: he had served as head of the Public School Society, a private organization which ran New York City's free schools using city money, when it began evening classes in 1848. Cooper conceived of the idea of having a free institute in New York, similar to the École Polytechnique (Polytechnical School) in Paris, which would offer free practical education to adults in the mechanical arts and science, to help prepare young men and women of the working classes for success in business.

In 1853, he broke ground for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a private college in New York, completing the building in 1859 at the cost of $600,000. Cooper Union offered open-admission night classes available to men and women alike, and attracted 2,000 responses to its initial offering, although 600 later dropped out. The classes were non-sectarian, and women were treated equally with men, although 95% of the students were male. Cooper started a Women's School of Design, which offered daytime courses in engraving, lithography, painting on china and drawing.

The new institution soon became an important part of the community. The Great Hall was a place where the pressing civic controversies of the day could be debated, and, unusually, radical views were not excluded. In addition, the Union's library, unlike the nearby Astor, Mercantile and New York Society Libraries, was open until 10:00 at night, so that working people could make use of them after work hours.

Today Cooper Union is recognized as one of the leading American colleges in the fields of architecture, engineering, and art. Carrying on Peter Cooper's belief that college education should be free, the Cooper Union awarded all its students with a full scholarship until fall 2014.

In 1851, Cooper was one of the founders of Children's Village, originally an orphanage called "New York Juvenile Asylum", one of the oldest non-profit organizations in the United States.

Cooper died on April 4, 1883 at the age of 92 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Aside from Cooper Union, the Peter Cooper Village apartment complex in Manhattan; the Peter Cooper Elementary School in Ringwood, New Jersey; the Cooper School in Superior, Wisconsin, the Peter Cooper Station post office; Cooper Park in Brooklyn, and Cooper Square in Manhattan are named in his honor.

The Sussex Railroad (later known as the Sussex Branch of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad) was a short-line railroad in northwestern New Jersey. It replaced its predecessor, the Sussex Mine Railroad, in 1853 and operated under the Sussex Railroad Company until 1945 when it was fully merged into the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (DL&W) system. The Sussex Railroad was important in the economic development of Sussex County as it supplied a route for early local industries, such as dairy farms and ore mines, to export their products. It was the last independently operated New Jersey railroad to be incorporated into the DL&W system. The last train travelled on the Sussex Railroad tracks on October 2, 1966. The tracks were removed soon after and the right-of-way was transformed into a rail trail known as the Sussex Branch trail.

The Sussex Mine Railroad, chartered on March 9, 1848, was the predecessor of the Sussex Railroad that was to be used for the sole purpose of hauling iron ore from the recently re-opened Andover Mine. The 3 ft (914 mm) narrow gauge railway was drawn by mules from the Andover Mine down to the Morris Canal at Waterloo Village and was then taken on to the Thomas Iron Furnaces in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Act by the New Jersey Legislature that incorporated the railroad also allowed for the provision of extending the rail into Newton, the county seat.

The initial 11 mi (18 km) of the Sussex Mine Railroad from the mine in Andover, which was named after the mine, was started in May 1849 and completed in August 1851. During construction of the railroad, the legislature approved a supplement to the charter on March 18, 1851, that allowed the railroad to extend the line to the Morris & Essex Railroad (M&E), which was extending its line to Hackettstown. The Sussex Mine Railroad struck a deal with the M&E that would work in their favor if they were to have the connection ready for operation by the time the M&E's extension reached Waterloo. In preparation for this extension and what eventually became a rebuilding of the entire existing line, the New Jersey Legislature approved another supplement to the charter on January 26, 1853, that allowed the company to change its name to the Sussex Railroad, reflecting its new purpose beyond just serving the mines and authorized the company to extend the track to any point in Sussex County on the Delaware River.

The renamed Sussex Railroad Company gained support by issuing stock and bonds, which raised the necessary funds to lay the new track. Ground was broken on the 4 ft 10 in (1,473 mm) track gauge line from Newton to Waterloo on May 5, 1853. The company wanted to proceed quickly to meet the deadline for the agreement that, if met, would mean a substantial source of revenue. Because of this fast pace, steeper grades and tighter curves were adopted than might have been preferred otherwise. Work progressed quickly, even though the M&E was trying to slow down progress any way they could, including compensating employees of the Sussex Railroad to delay the necessary cuts south of Newton. To speed work along, the Sussex Railroad Company used employees of the Andover Mine temporarily on the railroad right-of-way. All of this effort paid off as they were successful in meeting the deadline. The new railroad was completed and the first train entered Newton on November 27, 1854, with traffic between Newton and Waterloo being opened on December 11, 1854. The M&E connected to the Sussex Railroad in January 1855, thus the financial agreement made earlier was upheld.

At this point, the only stations on the Sussex Railroad were at Newton, Andover, and Waterloo, but they served many industries and moved products such as produce, dairy, meat, and of course iron ore from the mines. Increased interest in the franklinite and iron and zinc ores from Franklin further northeast of Newton prompted the New Jersey Legislature to adopt another supplement on February 4, 1863, that authorized the railroad to continue its line up to the Franklin Furnace and to other points north if "deemed most for the public good."

Expansion came swiftly with ground breaking on a ten-mile (16 km) extension line north of Newton through Lafayette and Augusta to Branchville in 1866, around the same time that the track gauge was adjusted to 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge. to align with the M&E tracks. This branch would allow for an outlet for Sussex County's northern agricultural products and staged the potential future expansion of the line through Culver's Gap to the Delaware River. The first train to run on the Branchville extension went as far as Lafayette on January 1, 1869, as work continued further up the line; the entire Branchville line was completed on July 3, 1869.

At the same time as work was being done on the Branchville line, pressure was increasing to bring rail to the ever-increasing mining industries of Franklin, including the New Jersey Zinc Company. Work finally began on this nine-mile (14 km)) extension in 1868, after a very heated debate and political power plays that could have routed traffic around Newton entirely. But residents of Newton rejected any plan to leave their town off the main line of traffic and insisted that the extension to Franklin be built north of Newton. The Franklin line opened to regular service in mid-September 1869. Additionally, an unconnected four-mile (6.4 km) spur known as the South Vernon extension, which ran from Hamburg to McAfee, was completed in 1871 and allowed access to an iron ore mine at the base of the Pochuck mountain range via trackage rights on the New Jersey Midland Railway. This represented the height of track building on the Sussex Railroad.

In the 1870s, depots at Franklin, McAfee, Lafayette were completed and a new depot at Newton was constructed. Some other platforms used for local agricultural industries were also completed at Sparta Junction and Monroe. The 1870s also saw another supplement to the charter allowing the railroad to extend rail to Stanhope for an easier connection with the M&E tracks, though the track wasn't laid until 1901. Notably, in 1879, steel tracks replaced iron for the first time on the Sussex Railroad.

This was to be the height of the Sussex Railroad. A little over a decade after the extensions had all been completed, the South Vernon extension was sold off to the Lehigh & Hudson River Railway (L&HR) on July 6, 1881, and the McAfee station was closed in May 1881. L&HR was also trying to buy a controlling interest in the Sussex Railroad Company, but the DL&W, which had already leased the M&E line that connected to the Sussex Railroad, bought the controlling interest on July 27, 1881. The Sussex Railroad was the last independently operated New Jersey railroad to be acquired by DL&W.

The Sussex Railroad, operating under the DL&W as the Sussex Branch, began its slow, early decline in the late 19th century, owing to the discovery of better ore elsewhere in the country. Many industries and mines began to close in Sussex County, including the blast furnace in Franklin that shut down in 1900. Still, there was some expansion: A new station was added at Cranberry Lake, which became a country getaway and weekend vacation spot for residents, and the Netcong-Stanhope Cutoff was completed in 1900, prompting the abandonment of the line to Waterloo.

As industry began to decrease in the area, the rise of the automobile and trucking took away valuable passenger and freight business from the Sussex Branch. As the area suffered during the Great Depression, so did the railroad. Permission was granted by the Public Utilities Commission to discontinue service to Franklin on February 23, 1932, with total abandonment of the Franklin branch being approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission on May 26, 1934. The remaining line was that of the 21-mile (34 km) Branchville to Stanhope line. By 1945, the Sussex Railroad ceased to exist and the company was finally fully merged into the DL&W.

The downward trend continued, with the 1950s seeing more industries served by the railroad go out of business. By 1959, mail service via the Sussex Branch ceased, and the final milk train ran in November 1964. The last passenger train departed from Branchville on July 10, 1966; the last passenger train from Newton on July 13, 1966; and the last passenger train on the entire branch departed Andover on October 2, 1966. By 1969, all track formerly owned by the Sussex Railroad was out of service, with the exception of the former South Vernon extension currently used by the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railway on its way to Syracuse and Utica, New York.

After abandonment, buildings deteriorated and track dismantled. The Newton passenger depot was demolished in November 1970. The final stretch of track between Andover and Stanhope/Netcong was removed in July 1977.

The roadbed for the Sussex Branch has mostly been preserved, however. The earliest purchase of a former right-of-way occurred in 1938 when Sussex County bought the former Franklin branch after service was discontinued. After all service ceased on the line, the state preserved the remainder of the line in the form of the Sussex Branch Trail, a division of the Kittatinny Valley State Park system. The trail stretches from Stanhope up to Branchville with only minor interruptions from privately owned sections.

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