This day in The Saratogian in 1916
Wednesday, September 27. 1916
Saratogians wait eagerly through the afternoon outside the Delaware & Hudson depot for the return of Company L of the Second New York Infantry regiment. More than 3,000 people give the troops a big reception when they finally arrive in Saratoga Springs.
Company L was mobilized for federal service late in June, in response to President Woodrow Wilson’s call for reinforcements along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Second New York spent the last two months in Texas, facing more danger from heat and hurricanes than from Mexicans.
The City Hall firebell rings shortly before 3 p.m. to announce that the train carrying the troops had just left Troy. The troops are expected to reach Saratoga Springs by 4:30, but the latest telegraph update at that time reports that the train is just pulling out of Green Island. By 5:15 it had reached Mechanicville.
In the meantime “The Masonic Band arrived early on the scene and provided frequent music for the amusement of the crowd which, on the minute the band started, made a rush to the south end of the depot, thinking the train had arrived.
“Jostling and pushing were suffered uncomplainingly and in good nature, and for once the demands of outraged corns went unheeded.”
The train reaches Ballston at 5:30 p.m. It finally arrives in Saratoga Springs at 6:15. The troops promptly assemble for a parade to the city armory, escorted by Mayor Walter P. Butler (who has a son in Company L) along with delegations of city police, Boy Scouts and veterans of the Civil War and Spanish-American War.
“The cheers that greeted the veterans and ex-members grew into a continued shout as the company itself passed,” The Saratogian reports, “and the ovation continued until the Armory was reached, the din of automobile horns being almost deafening.
“Such a tooting and dinning of horns and whistles, such a medley of shouted greetings and welcomes, of cheers and hurrahs and hand clappings, and waving of hats and handkerchiefs and flags, the town rarely ever saw before.
“And when those 112 soldiers set their 224 much marched feet inside the portals of the Armory a yell went up collectively and instinctively that would have made the battle cry of the best lunged tribe of Sioux ever known seem like the miaow of a two-months old kitty.”
Seven soldiers miss the parade and are taken straight to Saratoga Hospital to be treated for fevers and possible paratyphoid. Many of the others are “brown and berries, and apparently as hard as rocks,” though Cpl. Dick Sherman “came back with ten pounds that never saw Saratoga before.”
– Kevin Gilbert