Author: Alan Skeoch

Northville Twp. scene of wreck

Saturday morning July 20, 1907 EPISODE 717 ADDITION….   TRAIN WRECK

July 22, 2007
A farmer and his son stood in a Northville Township field watching two steam locomotives speed toward each other on a single track. The boy asked his dad, “How are those trains going to get past each other?” Replied his dad, “They’re not.”
It was a bit after 9 o’clock the morning of Saturday, July 20, 1907. One of the locomotives had started at 6 o’clock that morning in Ionia pulling 11 cars with hundreds of passengers for an outing in Detroit. The other engine was coming west from Plymouth, hauling seven freight cars.
Pere Marquette Railroad Locomotive 155, driven by engineer Lee Alvord of Ionia, was heading downhill at 55 m.p.h. Alvord watched Pere Marquette Engine 71 round a curve at 25 or 35 mph and head toward him. Alvord jumped. The two trains slammed head-on.
People were killed as the flimsy wooden Pere Marquette coaches shattered into splinters and passenger cars telescoped into each other. Steam from boilers scalded people. Wilson Rogers, the freight train engineer, was scorched as he jumped. Coaches flew over Locomotive 155 and smashed into or over the freight engine.
Later that day, 28 bodies were shipped back to Ionia for burial. More than 30 people — the exact number is unclear — lost their lives because of the Pere Marquette wreck that hot July day, said Al Smitley, a local history librarian at the Northville District Library.
There’s a cornfield now at the northeast corner of 5 Mile and Napier, and a row of old apple trees overlooks the deep cut through which Alvord drove the Pere Marquette locomotive. But even from the hill, you can’t see around the curve.
I stood there one hot July day with Smitley and Salem Township historian Gilbert Terry, a student of train wrecks. They showed me where the wreckage lay most of that dreadful day.
On Wednesday, July 25, Smitley will give a lecture on the wreck and show photographs at 7 p.m. in the Northville District Library — five days after the 100th anniversary of the crash that took place in Northville Township.
Smitley has collected many contemporary newspaper articles about the wreck and assembled excerpts into a chronological digest of newspaper quotations. It’s a fascinating read.
After the crash, Alvord got to his feet and asked someone to look at his watch. It said 9:14. That was a big relief, he said. His train was on time. From the beginning of this catastrophe, the loss of life, the injuries and the general mayhem were less important for Pere Marquette officials than shifting blame away from the rail company. The scapegoats would be freight engineer Rogers and his conductor, Fred Hamilton.
Pere Marquette officials might well have been concerned.
In that one week, the line had five accidents. That year, railroad accidents killed nearly 12,000 people — the leading cause of violent death in the nation, Smitley said.
The Pere Marquette line had a big repair works in Ionia, and between 600 and 800 workers and relatives were headed for a day on Belle Isle.
Ionia Mayor John Bible heard the terrible news and tried to lead relief workers to the wreck site. Pere Marquette officials stopped them at South Lyon.
Declared Mayor Bible: “We were not curiosity seekers. We were going to help, and I never heard of such a thing as the treatment we received.”
Meanwhile, sightseers from Plymouth, Northville, Salem and surrounding towns stood looking into the cut where the wreckage with dead and injured still lay on the tracks.
Pere Marquette blamed the disaster on the freight crew. Pere Marquette General Manager William D. Trump said, “The wreck occurred by reason of an unmitigated disobedience of orders of the crew of the freight train. They were instructed to look out for the excursion train. Running the way they were, they should have been in Salem four minutes before the wreck occurred. They took a chance in direct disobedience to orders. There could have been no mistake. It was disobedience.”
Destroying evidence
James Robison, an assistant Wayne County prosecutor, watched over the wreckage.
“As soon as the spectators had departed,” he said, “a crew of 100 men swooped down upon the wreckage, and their movements were a revelation. I well knew my powerlessness to stop the company from destroying evidence, and the work that was done was not for the purpose of clearing the track for traffic, but to destroy evidence.
“The debris was already at the sides of the track, but as quickly as men and machinery could work, it was taken away under cover of the darkness and burned. What startled everyone was the way whole cars, very little injured, were taken away and burned.
“Of course, there was a reason for that. The cars were mere matchboxes. They were of the old shell type with practically no resisting power. There wasn’t a steel frame in the entire train of 11 coaches. The cars were unfit to carry human beings in.”
Conductor Hamilton believed he’d misread his orders. But freight engineer Rogers, lying scalded and bruised in a Plymouth hotel bed, said, “Let the blame go where it belongs — not to the men on the freight train, but to the men who knew where both trains were every minute of the hour.”
On July 25, 1907, the Ionia Daily Sentinel editorialized: “We refuse to be a party to the attempt to fasten the whole blame of this deplorable affair upon the trainmen. A little more official surveillance and eternal vigilance alone will prevent frequent recurrences of these horrors.”
General Manager Trump testified at the coroner’s inquest that “under the system, everything is up to the man in jeans. No blame can attach anywhere else.”
Interstate Commerce Commission inspector F.C. Smith said: “You cannot get an employee to tell the absolute truth when his superior officers sit listening to him. I regard the presence of General Manager Trump at the inquest as a positive detriment.”
Conductor Hamilton “is suffering greatly under the strain of self-guilt,” reported the Grand Rapids Press.
The verdict
The coroner’s jury found that the freight train crew misread their order “due to the imperfect and improper manner in which it was prepared. … We find the operating system of the Pere Marquette and the rules and regulations governing the same defective.”
Nobody was prosecuted.
Hamilton tried to work for other railroads, but whenever his connection to the Northville Township wreck was discovered, he was fired. He died a few years later on a Montana ranch.
Ten days after the wreck, engineer Alvord, on crutches, took the train to Lowell and watched the Saranac-Lowell baseball game.
Contact JOEL THURTELL at 248-351-3296 or thurtell@freepress.com.