31 In the frantic attempts at rescue and survival that occurred between 1:45 and 2:00am, Thomas Reynolds, a brickyard employee, suddenly remembered that the Montreal express would come past at 2:24am. To his horror he realized the train would instantly be submerged, as water had ravaged 300 feet of local tracks. Reynolds snatched a white lantern, wrapped it in his red shirt, and ran to place it on the tracks so the incoming engineer could stop the train with adequate notice. Reynolds’s thinking saved the death toll from climbing into the dozens, and when the train’s wheels finally stopped revolving, the locomotive was already deep in water. 49 For days after the disaster, hundreds visited the scene to view the outcome while rescue efforts continued (Figure 12 and Figure 13). Only then could the full extent of damage to two of Timoney’s brickyards be assessed, and the losses totaled to about $30,000. Brickmaking machinery, tools, kilns, and bricks laid in the drying yard had been erased. Though oral history often tells that Timoney lost his fortune and house as a direct result of the Melzingah disaster, the veteran brickmaker resumed operations within months. He gradually began his own retirement from this point however, granting his son Francis A. more control in the manufacturing while another male son, John H., found an occupation as a grocer. Timoney’s son-in-law and longtime bookkeeper, John C. McNamara, prepared to engage in the brick business. McNamara and his wife Mary A. Timoney at times lived with the family, and their great-grandson claimed the couple’s son, Francis J. McNamara, had been born in the Timoney house in August 1892. Perhaps as a gesture signifying Timoneyville had resurrected itself, Timoney financed the construction of a Catholic brick chapel in support of his workers, echoing Gouvenour Kemble’s Chapel of Our Lady in the 1830s. Juan J. Jova, a brickmaking colleague at Roseton, Newburgh, had in 1891 constructed a Catholic chapel, Our Lady of Mercy, for his workers of his own brick. Timoney’s church might be considered unassuming when placed against Kemble and Jova’s churches,
