The next thing was to get out the ties. These were made from logs nine feet long, which were split open through the heart, then quartered and split from the heart to the center of the back, until the pieces were about six or seven inches through on the back. Then the backs of the ties were hewed flat, making them about three square, when they were ready to be used on the road. They were placed back down across the bed pieces and spiked fast to them. They were laid about three feet apart the length of the road. Over those sills, in the upper edge of the ties, they cut out two gains. In those gains they laid two stringers running directly over the sleepers. These stringers were sawed out about four by six inches square. They were laid in the gains of the ties, spiked fast and wedged with wooden wedges. Then the woodwork was finished and everything ready for pulling on the iron. They used the strap rail iron. The bars were two inches and a quarter wide and half an inch thick. These bars were laid flat on top, and next to the in-edge, of the stringers and were spiked fast to them. In this way our railroad was built. The cars running away west on it, penetrating Michigan as the harbinger of civilization, opened up a way for the resources of the country. The strap iron which they used first proved to be very poor iron. In after years, if a spike came out or the bar cracked off at the spike hole, the bar would turn up like a serpent's head and if not seen in time it was liable to throw the train off the track and do damage. I was at Dearborn at one time when an accident, of this kind, happened to a freight train, a little west of the village. There was considerable property destroyed, barrels broken in pieces and flour strewed over the ground, but no lives were lost. Father said the railroad was a good thing for us and our country, and that they would soon have one, and the cars running on it to the State of New York. Then I reiterated my promise to mother. I said if the cars ran through our native place, we could go back there without crossing Lake Erie, the thought of which chilled me every time I spoke to mother about going back to make a visit. Time sped on, days, months, and some years had passed, since the first of the Michigan Central Railroad was built, and the cars running east and west loaded with passengers and freight, when one morning I heard a strange noise. It was terrible and unaccountable to me, as much so as it would have been if I had heard heavy thunder at mid-day, from a clear sky. I heard it from the direction of Dearbornville; It appeared to originate there, or in the woods that way. I heard it two or three times, several days in succession.