Beyond Montrose: Viaducts, Carousels, and the Town That Gave America Its Farms

The endless part

The name of this region is older than the country. In 1749, the mapmaker Lewis Evans published his map of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and across a great swath of the northeast he wrote two words: "Endless Mountains." Evans had surveyed the region in 1743 with the botanist John Bartram and the diplomat Conrad Weiser, and wrote that the long, uniform ridges were what "the Indians called 'The Endless Mountains.'" Nearly three centuries later, the four counties — Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Wyoming — still carry the name, and a heritage nonprofit established in 1998 is pursuing federal National Heritage Area designation for the region.

Montrose, the county seat of Susquehanna County, sits near the heart of those endless ridges. And here's what the guidebooks miss: within about twenty-five miles of this quiet hill town lie a stone viaduct that awed a president, six free carousels built by a shoe magnate, the company town that invented corporate welfare, the birthplace of IBM, and the boyhood home of the man who gave America its farms. Montrose is the still center. The stories radiate outward.

The bridge that stopped a president

Seventeen miles northeast of Montrose, near Lanesboro, the Starrucca Creek valley is spanned by one of the great engineering works of the nineteenth century: the Starrucca Viaduct. Built in 1847–48 by the New York & Erie Railroad, it runs 1,040 feet long and 100 feet high, with seventeen stone arches of locally quarried Pennsylvania bluestone bound with Rosendale cement. Some eight hundred workers — mostly Irish immigrants, paid about a dollar a day, living in a "city of tents" — raised it in about a year. The on-site marker records the cost at $316,770; at the time it was the largest and most expensive stone arch bridge built in America.

The first locomotive crossed on December 9, 1848 — the Erie's 15-ton 4-4-0 Orange, built by the Norris Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. And when the full Erie line opened in May 1851, the inspection trip carried President Millard Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster — Webster reportedly insisted on riding in a rocking chair on a flatcar to take in the view. The Hudson River School artist Jasper Francis Cropsey painted the viaduct in 1865; the painting hangs in the Toledo Museum of Art.

The viaduct is still in active railroad use — a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark (1973) and on the National Register (1975), owned by Norfolk Southern and leased to the New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway since 2005. Few places on earth let you feel 175 years collapse the way standing beneath those seventeen arches does.

The town that gave the country a ride

Eighteen miles north, across the New York line, Binghamton calls itself the "Carousel Capital of the World" — and it has the hardware to prove it. Between 1919 and 1934, the shoe magnate George F. Johnson donated six carousels to the Triple Cities. All six were built by the Allan Herschell Company of North Tonawanda, all are wood-carved, all still operate in the summer months, all are on the National Register — and all are free to ride. The admission price has never changed: traditionally, find and dispose of one piece of litter.

The Ross Park carousel (1920) has sixty "jumper" horses and its original Wurlitzer band organ. The C. Fred Johnson Park carousel (1923) is the largest and most ornate, with 72 carved figures. And the Recreation Park carousel (donated 1925) inspired an episode of The Twilight Zone — its creator, Rod Serling, was a Binghamton native. The town's minor-league baseball team, the Double-A Binghamton Rumble Ponies, is named for the carousel horses. Even the archive of Serling's work lives here, at the Bundy Museum of History and Art — the 1893 Queen Anne house of Harlow E. Bundy at 129 Main Street.

Bundy matters for another reason: in 1889, Harlow Bundy and his brother Willard founded the Bundy Manufacturing Company in Binghamton — eight employees making time-clock recorders. That company became the International Time Recording Company, then part of the 1911 merger that created the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, renamed IBM in 1924. The whole information age has a Binghamton birth certificate.

The Square Deal

Johnson's shoe company deserves its own chapter, because it was one of the great social experiments in American business. The company grew from the Lester Brothers Boot and Shoe Company, begun in Binghamton in 1854; the factory town was incorporated as Lestershire in 1892 and renamed Johnson City in 1916, while neighboring Endicott was laid out as a company-planned town in 1906. Johnson's philosophy was the "Square Deal": the company financed workers' homes, shared profits, funded medical care — and built for the whole community two libraries, theaters, a golf course, swimming pools, parks, and those carousels.

The workers themselves paid for and erected the two stone "Home of the Square Deal" arches (dedicated September 6, 1920), still standing at the Binghamton–Johnson City and Johnson City–Endicott lines. The labor organizer Samuel Gompers, asked why he never organized Endicott-Johnson's workers, said the company already gave them more than unions had won elsewhere. By the 1920s the company employed 20,000; in the mid-1940s it made 52 million pairs of shoes a year — nearly all U.S. Army footwear in both World Wars. And here's a link back to the IBM story: E-J's Square Deal example pushed its Endicott neighbor — the Bundy/C-T-R works — into becoming one of the earliest major providers of employee benefits.

IBM's birthplace, twenty miles up the road

Which brings us to the rumor you'll hear in Susquehanna County — that IBM got its start near Montrose. It's mostly right and slightly wrong, and the true version is better.

IBM was never started in Montrose, or in Pennsylvania at all. On June 16, 1911, the financier Charles Ranlett Flint merged four companies — Bundy's time clocks, the International Time Recording Company, Herman Hollerith's punched-card Tabulating Machine Company, and the Computing Scale Company — into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, headquartered in Endicott, New York. The Endicott factory, begun in 1905, is remembered as the "Birthplace of IBM." In 1914, Thomas J. Watson Sr. — forty, fresh from an antitrust conviction later set aside on appeal — joined as general manager, became president within eleven months, and in 1924 renamed the company International Business Machines.

Endicott sits about twenty miles north of Montrose, just across the state line. So the honest version stands: Montrose is twenty miles from the birthplace of IBM.

The Erie's other boom town

Sixteen miles northeast of Montrose, Susquehanna Depot was the Erie Railroad's company town the way Port Jervis was down the line. The Erie's giant repair shops rose in 1865 at a cost of $1.25 million — plus half a million in tools and machinery — on an eight-acre site, and the yard ran until about 1960. In March 1874, when the Erie fell behind on wages, the shop workers seized the works: disabled locomotives were locked inside the roundhouse, engine parts held hostage around town. The county sheriff refused to evict the strikers; the governor refused to send state troops; the Erie threatened to move the shops to Elmira — and the strike collapsed within hours. It is one of the great labor standoffs of the railroad age, and it happened in a town most people have never heard of.

The town's Starrucca House (1863–65) tells the passenger side: a 327-foot Gothic-revival railroad hotel that slept 200 guests, with a cavernous arched dining room serving the pre-dining-car era's version of fast food. The old rail yard, remediated from 2017 to 2020, is now a fourteen-acre community park — the industrial past, landscaped.

The fair and the farm vote

Back in the county, two institutions anchor Montrose's own story. The Harford Fair, held by the Harford Agricultural Society since 1857, opened its first edition on November 9, 1858 — seventy-six people attended, and one of the first recorded exhibits was five heads of cabbage weighing seventeen pounds apiece. By 1880 it drew 3,500 people and a thousand teams of oxen; today some 65,000 flood in during the third week of August.

And on the courthouse green in Montrose stands a monument to Galusha A. Grow, who studied law here and joined the county bar in 1847. Grow became Speaker of the U.S. House (1861–63) and, in that chair, authored and signed the Homestead Act of 1862 — 160 acres of public land to any citizen willing to work it, the law that settled the West. A small town in the Endless Mountains raised the man who gave millions of families their farms.

The Susquehanna County Courthouse itself — Greek Revival brick, fluted Ionic columns, octagonal cupola, built 1854–55 from blue-clay bricks dug just east of town — stands on the National Register, on a green with an 1887 Civil War memorial. Downtown keeps four blocks of original nineteenth-century storefronts; St. Paul's Episcopal, an 1857 Richard Upjohn design, is called "a perfect gem." And seven miles north, Salt Springs State Park guards hemlocks 300 to 500 years old in a waterfall gorge — trees that were seedlings when Shakespeare was writing.

A quiet corner of the century

That's the thing about this corner of Pennsylvania. The biggest company of the twentieth century was born twenty miles north. The law that settled the West was written by a Montrose lawyer. A bridge that awed a president still carries freight, and the carousels still spin for free.

La Crescenta sits in the middle of all of it — Zara's Getaways' secluded bungalow in Montrose, with its own pond and endless views. Spend a day at the Starrucca Viaduct, watching a train cross 1848. Spend another riding the Binghamton carousels and standing in Endicott where IBM began. Spend a morning among the ancient hemlocks at Salt Springs, and an afternoon reading the monument to the man who signed the Homestead Act. Then come home, pour something warm, and watch the sun go down over the Endless Mountains — the same ridges Lewis Evans labeled on his map in 1749, endless then, endless now.