By Molly Grace
On
September 21, 1910 two trolley cars on the Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley
interurban railroad collided as a result of negligence, lax regulations and bad
luck. The wreck rocked the town of Bluffton and nearby towns of Kingsland and
Fort Wayne as well as gaining national attention if for nothing other than its
incredible body count; forty-two people were killed, most of them immediately
in the crush of splintered wood and steel, and seven people were left either
somewhat or seriously injured. The effects of this, the deadliest interurban
wreck in the history of the interurban era in the United States, were
complicated and would take years to unfold, not necessarily making waves all on
their own. However, the immediate aftermath was felt deeply by the inhabitants
of Bluffton, Indiana, whose fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers made up the
majority of the people on board the trolley car. The effects of this crash, as
such, were felt in many ways—the community was torn apart, yet brought
together, and the addition of such a major wreck to an already long list of
deadly wrecks would eventually lead to regulation changes for how passenger
trains could operate, making the railways safer for everybody.
The
community of Bluffton, Indiana—the town most devastatingly affected by the
wreck—was a very small, tight-knit one. Bluffton was known as a good town; a
place of welcome and friendliness, where everybody knew each other’s names. It was
known as “The Parlor City” because its paved streets made the city “as clean as
your parlor.”[1]
Settled by a small number of settlers that included the Studabaker family (who
would become quite prominent in the town) in the 1830s,[2]
the town grew slowly but steadily as a farming community. Living in such a
secluded area, too far from neighboring cities to commute regularly, the
townspeople relied on each other for help, as well as entertainment. At night friends
would gather for storytelling, singing contests, spelling bees and more.[3] By
the 1890s, Bluffton’s population had shot up from humble beginnings to around
4500.[4]
The swiftly- growing population brought with it a need for an easy way to
shuttle goods from the prosperous town of Fort Wayne just north of them. John
Studabaker and a few other entrepreneurial-minded men began talk of connecting
Fort Wayne and Bluffton with a railroad in 1849, though the project would go
untouched for nearly twenty years due to lack of funding. This was Bluffton’s
first flirtations with what would become an integral yet tricky relationship
with interurban rail. By 1869, the railway was completed, with plans to connect
the town to nearby Muncie already underway.[5]
Bluffton
was not alone in its desire to connect with neighboring towns and cities. The
interurban railway was the early 20th century’s favorite form of
transit, and remained so through the 1920s and into the 30s.[6]
This period is known as the “Interurban Era”. Particularly in Indiana was this
form of transportation very popular and heavily relied-upon. However, it was
quite flawed, and wrecks resulting in casualties were, unfortunately, not uncommon.
The trouble with early trolley car design was that the cars were made of wood.
In wrecks they were easily crushed and could often catch fire. Another issue
was lack of regulation. Railroad rules were lax at best and nonexistent at
worst. There was no standard for safety of cars carrying passengers and there
was no good signaling system to prevent collisions.
The
mood on the northbound Bluffton line trolley of the Fort Wayne and Wabash
Valley rail line was jovial. The passengers were heading to the Allen County
fair in Fort Wayne. The event was a popular one that had moods high and had the
carriage filled with loud, excited voices. It also meant that the car was
packed to capacity, with many people forced to stand in the aisle. It is
estimated that fifty-five passengers were on board the northbound trolley.[7]
Headed southward was the other trolley involved in the collision. It was empty,
running as an “extra” and thus only contained the crew conducting it. Both cars
were running at or near full speed.[8]
The southbound car had orders to move into a siding, which is a loop track that
allows the trolley to move out of the way of an oncoming car and move back onto
the main rail once the car has cleared, north of Kingsland to make way for the
northbound car. For whatever reason, the orders were not fulfilled. The car
continued south at full speed, where it would meet tragedy. The northbound
train was following the orders and moving forward on the assumption that it was
being given the right of way at the siding. Unfortunately, the southbound car
had missed the siding and was heading straight for collision. Both cars were
running too fast to accommodate the extra traffic the fair had brought in. A
little after noon, the northbound and southbound approached a curve that was
surrounded by dense woods. They would not be able to see each other until it
was too late. Some accounts of the event say that the people on board realized
what was happening in the few short seconds before the collision and attempted
to hurry to the rear of the car, a final fighting attempt to lessen the pain of
the impact.[9]
The
headline of the September 22 edition of the Decatur Democrat, a local
newspaper, declared “Bluffton, a City of Gloom”[10]
and indeed, with the gruesome and horrifying deaths of its own residents, it
was. When the two cars collided, the larger and heavier southbound car
telescoped the smaller, people-packed northbound, plowing into it. The
newspaper reports of the day read like the screenplay to an action movie; the
Ligonier Leader reported that the sound of the collision could be heard as far
as three miles away and that people within a half mile radius thought there had
been an explosion.[11]
The human bodies involved were shown no mercy; many of the corpses had
succumbed to severed heads, mangled limbs, flesh torn right from their bones,
“the bodies being entangled with the timbers of the crushed cars.”[12]
Thirty five people were killed immediately, four more succumbed to their
injuries on the scene and three more died soon after in the hospital.
Immediately after the impact, conductor of the northbound E.A. Spiller, in an
act that undoubtedly saved many more lives and further disaster, jumped from
the wreckage to hurry south on foot; there was another car coming up the track.
He was able to flag down the approaching trolley to warn it before he,
according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “toppled over in a dead faint.”[13]
John
R. Boyd of Marion had perhaps the most unique perspective of the collision. He
was last to get on the crowded train and thus the only place where there was
room for him to stand was on the car’s step. From his view on the step, he was
able to see the impending collision even before the crews on either of the
trains did. He jumped from the car before the collision, an act that saved him
from injury and likely death. He later gave his account of what happened to the
Indianapolis Star: “There was a splintering crash, a dull grinding as wood and
iron resolved themselves into a mass of wreckage and mingled themselves with
human blood and flesh and bones. The big limited car, like an angry monster,
seemed to climb upon the frailer and heavier loaded car, and from its pilot to
within six feet of the rear swept over the crowded coach, raking it almost
clean. That anything alive could have survived that terrible sweep of
splintered wood and twisted steel is a miracle. Following the crash there was a
period of appalling stillness and then the shrieks and groans of the wounded
and dying rose upon the air.”[14]
Boyd
and his fellow survivors got to work providing aid to those they could while
waiting for formal help to arrive. There were two doctors aboard the car that
began efforts to help aid the injured as soon as the wreck had occurred. One of
the doctors had been seriously injured but as soon as they could both get
themselves out of the wreckage they got to work giving aid to those most
immediately in need of it.[15] However,
their job was made difficult because many of the seriously injured were pinned
within the two cars or under debris and could only wait.
Right
away, nearby farmers and other locals began arriving at the scene to offer what
they could. Bodies were removed from the wreckage, and the farmers’ wives
brought out sheets to cover the dead with as well as to tear into makeshift
bandages for the injured. It took an hour and a half for any formal help to
come.[16]
Relief cars were sent on the track and an automobile full of physicians from
Bluffton was also sent to the scene. The severely injured were hurried to
hospitals as quickly as possible, and later in the evening the dead were
removed from the scene and the totaled northbound car was burned.
The crew of the southbound train—motorman B.T. Corkwell and
Conductor Del Wilson—are both considered
responsible for the tragedy.[17]
However, to place the blame solely on them is to ignore a trend that the United
States was willing to smilingly ignore because it was seen as a small price to
pay for the convenience of interurban rail. While the ignorance of the order
given was directly responsible for this particular crash, it cannot be denied
that there are many more factors at play here—factors having to do with the
regulations that ruled the interurban rail during its heyday. Both trains were
being run in a manner that would simply not be allowed today without
regulations of railroad operating rules as well as state and federal laws being
broken. The cars were running at dangerously high speeds due to pressures from
the fair traffic. This was before block signals, devices used to signal to
other trains to prevent collisions, were commonplace and regulated.
Additionally, there was little regulation concerning the safety of cars that
held human cargo. Keeping this in mind and looking over all of the little
things that directly led to the crash—the ignored order, the collision point
that was the only place the collision could have happened as it did with the
conductors so blind until the last minute—it is clear that the whole situation
created a “perfect storm” that made this event inevitable.
In
the days following the crash, the town of Bluffton came to a standstill.
Businesses and schools closed. The town was in mourning. Being a small and
close-knit community, many of the residents had a family member or friend who
had either been killed or injured, although unfortunately it was more often the
former. The townspeople were absolutely devastated, coming together to make
plans on how best to honor the lives lost. That is not to say, however, that
their attitudes toward the interurban had changed. The railway was seen as such
a vital part of their lives. They did not think of that as part of the problem.
Railway accidents such as this, though certainly not as bloody as this, were
nearly a commonplace in the Interurban Era. It was an occupational hazard.
After the crash, they had no interest in activism, revenge or prevention of
further loss; their job was to bury their dead and try to forget. As for what
we can glean from what history left us, it does not appear that the locals held
any prolonged grudges, as the conductors who held the blame for the tragedy
were not even fired.
After
many years and countless preventable deaths, laws were finally put forth to
protect interurban railway passengers. These laws, part of the Code of Federal
Regulations, greatly improved railroad transport, and were brought about in
part in response to the many interurban railway wrecks. The laws regulate train
speeds, require traffic signaling devices on railroads and specify minimum
safety requirements for designs of interurban cars. The laws also require
regular inspection of the cars as well as all safety equipment.[18] Despite
what seems like significant change, it was change that was inevitable and a
change only in laws, not in attitudes. While it was propelled by the many disasters of the interurban era, the fact
is that these disasters did not make interurban rail any less popular to the
people using it.[19]
The force that actually ended up successfully taking down the interurban
industry was the automobile industry, which is an interesting statement about
Americans and their priorities.
The
train wreck in Kingsland was the deadliest of its kind, and in many ways it had
the effect it should have: It brought a community closer through the sheer
terribleness of tearing it apart. Parents, children, old, young, prominent
citizen or a nobody, it did not matter, the splintered wood did not
discriminate, it took the lives of everyone it could. In other ways, however,
the wreck did not resonate with the community in the ways one would expect. It
seems there should have been an outcry, a call to action. Why was this sort of
tragedy allowed to happen? Yet on that matter the residents of Bluffton and of
the surrounding affected cities, and in fact people around the country, they
all remained eerily quiet. Our relationship to the interurban rail was a
turbulent and weird one. It gave us so much yet would often take that which was
near and dear to us. We stuck with it because we needed the interurban to
connect us to our neighbors, even though the price to pay was high—in this
case, the price was forty two lives.
[1] “Bluffton,
Indiana: The Parlor City” http://ci.bluffton.in.us/
[2] “Backwoods
Bluffton” http://www.wchs-museum.org/webdoc9.htm
[3]
Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5]
Ibid.
[6] Staff
reporter. “Interurban Streetcars of the Early 1900s.” The Indianapolis Star. January 10, 2013.
[7] Ed
Breen. “Mass-transit tragedy.” The
Journal Gazette. September 19, 2010.
[8] “Trolley
Wreck Inquiry.” The New York Times.
September 23, 1910.
[9] Larry
W. Owen, The Kingsland Wreck (CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 25.
[10] “Bluffton,
a city of gloom.” Decatur Daily Democrat.
September 22, 1910.
[11] “Forty
die in trolley crash.” Ligonier Leader.
September 29, 1910.
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Trolley
wreck on Indiana road kills 42, hurts 7.” Chicago
Daily Tribune. September 21, 1910.
[14] “Forty
killed and 8 injured when cares collide near Bluffton.” The Indianapolis Star. September 22, 1910.
[15] “Forty
two killed in trolley wreck.” The New
York Times. September 22, 1910.
[16] “Forty
killed and 8 injured when cares collide near Bluffton.” The Indianapolis Star. September 22, 1910.
[17] Robert
Carroll Reed, Train Wrecks: A Pictorial
History of Accidents on the Main Line (Schiffer Publishing, January), 376.
[18] “Code
of Federal Regulations” http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text
[19] Staff
reporter. “Interurban Streetcars of the Early 1900s.” The Indianapolis Star. January 10, 2013.
