In the early 1900s, this spot at Tupper Lake's Junction was one of the busiest places in the Adirondacks, where the Northern Adirondack Railroad built by John Hurd in 1890 and the Adirondack and St. Lawrence Railroad constructed by Dr. William Seward Webb in 1892 crossed in 1899 and helped drive the village's rapid development as an industrial site. The railroads brought people to work in the woods and on the railroads and, most importantly, made faster shipment of lumber to market possible. The community beside the rail yards became known as Downtown, the Junction, and Faust after it acquired its own post office in 1898, and those names persisted even after postal and railroad services ended. Until the 1950s, more than a dozen trains passed through daily from Utica, Montreal, and Ottawa, and with no highways, buses, or planes, all traffic in and out of Tupper Lake moved by rail over more than 20 sets of tracks in constant use. Because railroads were essential to getting hardwood logs to market but were costly to build and operate in this remote region, lumber operators turned to foreign labor brokers in New York City, and many Italians came to build the rail lines in and around Tupper Lake, with the first recruited by John Hurd to build parts of his line from Santa Clara to Tupper Lake. Passenger railroad service to Tupper Lake lasted 75 years and ended in 1965, when the last New York Central Adirondack Division passenger train rolled through the Junction on April 24 on its way to Lake Placid, followed on September 25 by a final excursion sponsored by the Central New York Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society that carried about 900 passengers in 20 railcars north from Syracuse for one last trip through the Adirondack forest.