The footprints of our community past, clear evidence of the energetic passage of generations preceding us, are available in many forms and media but most precise and understandable are the files of local newspapers, produced by persons who were careful to tell the facts of all that was happening around them and whose editors demanded accuracy in every phrase. Files of The Carthage Press are more helpful than many others in the area, because that staff really cared about its standard of performance. A good example is found in the files of early May, 1904, in the wake of a railway collision near the Frisco station along Spring River in the bottomland of North Carthage:
“A head-end collision between an extra freight train from Monett, bound for Carl Junction, and a passenger train, leaving Columbus, Kan., and advancing through the Carthage stop. Moving at about five miles an hour, the passenger engine was smashed almost to a junk pile and the freight train was damaged to some extent, yet not a coach nor a car behind either engine left the track. Neither was there any person injured. The accident occurred on the Frisco track 100 yards east of the Missouri-Pacific bridge which crosses the Frisco tracks and Spring River. The Frisco track here rounds the high ground on a long curve. At a point where the collision took place an engineer can see his track for only about 75 yards ahead. Ten feet below the tracks on the north flows Spring River and on the other side a bluff extends upward, the base protruding upward to within a foot of the ties. These surroundings make the curve one of the worst places on the Frisco system.
The passenger train was the Columbus-to-Springfield accommodation due in Carthage about 4 0’clock and scheduled to leave at 4:10. It was on time on the dot and was moving along at a reduced speed preparatory to entering the station. Engineer ‘Dad’ Martin and Fireman George Iby occupied the cab and Conductor Jackson was in charge of the train. An extra freight had pulled into the yards a few minutes before 4 o’clock from the east and had stopped for orders on the main track in front of the depot. Finding that the passenger train from the west was due, Conductor Ed Borland says he ordered his engineer, Gillespie, to whistle the head brakeman to go down the track around the bluff and flag the morning passenger until they could take the siding. But the engineer only had orders to pull down the track and back in on the switch. This he did. The freight had proceeded about 500 yards down the track and just skirted the edge of the bluff when the passenger rounded the curve. Both train crews apparently saw each other at the same moment. Both reversed or set air brakes and jumped. . . . The big engines crashed with a noise like rattling thunder. The lighter of the two engines, the one pulling the passenger, was almost demolished. . . . There were possibly 40 people on the passenger train and, save for a skinned finger and minor bruises no one was injured. . . .”
There was general agreement that everyone felt fortunate to have escaped serious harm in a serious mixup.
Marvin VanGilder is the Jasper County Historian and a columnist for The Carthage Press
