Page 30 - Leisure Living Magazine June 2018

“An Ideal Tragedy”
By Justice Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court
The 29th
of December
in 1876 was
a windswept,
snowy night in
northeastern
Ohio. A bliz-
zard had pum-
meled the town
of Ashtabula all
day Friday, and
almost two feet
of snow had fall-
en with 50 mph
wind gusts that
produced waist-
high drifts. It
was a night to
hunker down at
home. But de-
spite the weather, the trains were still running – although not on time.
The “Pacific Express” of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway was almost three hours late getting to Ashtabula from Erie, Penn- sylvania. The train was slowly chugging through snowdrifts while the 159 passengers and crew stayed warm inside cars heated by coal-fired stoves and lit by oil lamps.
The 11-car train – pulled by two locomotives nicknamed “Socrates” and “Columbia” – was about 300 yards from the Ashtabula station at roughly 7:30 p.m. when it started over a bridge spanning the Ashtabula River. Socrates had just cleared the bridge when its engineer felt an odd sensation of heading uphill.
In an instant, disaster struck as the eleven- year-old iron bridge suddenly collapsed. The en- gineer gunned Socrates forward, but Columbia de-coupled, and the rest of the train plunged 70 feet into the river.
No one knows how many people were killed in the initial crash. But for the ones who survived the fall, the terror had only just begun. Many of the people inside were trapped in the snarled wreckage of train cars and bridge trusses, while
others were too injured to get themselves out. Moments later, the sit- uation got worse when the coal stoves and oil lamps set the var- nished wood inside the cars ablaze, and fire quickly spread throughout the compartments.
Ultimately, 92 people were killed, although the exact count was difficult to determine in the smoldering wreckage. It was the worst train disaster in Amer- ican history until the Great Train Wreck of 1918 in Nashville, when two trains collided head-on,
killing 101.
In a day when newspapers provided the only
coverage of such events, the Chicago Tribune gave a vivid account of the scene the next morn- ing. “The proportions of the Ashtabula horror are now approximately known. Daylight, which gave an opportunity to find and enumerate the saved, reveals the fact that two out of every three passen- gers on the fated train are lost.
“The disaster was dramatically complete. No element of horror was wanting. First, the crash of the bridge, the agonizing moments of suspense as the seven laden cars plunged down their fearful leap to the icy riverbed; then the fire, which came to devour all that had been left alive by the crash; then the water, which gurgled up from under the broken ice and offered another form of death, and finally, the biting blast filled with snow, which froze and benumbed those who had escaped wa- ter and fire. It was an ideal tragedy.”
In the aftermath of this “ideal tragedy,” the
30 |LeisureLiving June 2018
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