Editor’s note: The following historical account by the late historian Nathan Goff Carter contains graphic descriptions of injuries and death.
DUNBAR, W.Va. — On the morning of July 4, 1891, a passenger train departed Charleston for Columbus, carrying families, railroad employees, and excursionists bound for Independence Day celebrations. About eight miles into the journey, engineer Pat O’Connor noticed a pale haze rising ahead of his locomotive from a railroad trestle. In the cool Kanawha Valley morning, it looked like fog, but it was smoke.
The wooden ties supporting the rails had burned overnight, apparently after hot coals or cinders from an earlier train fell onto the trestle. The locomotive and baggage car made it across, but the weakened structure gave way beneath two crowded passenger coaches. Contemporary newspapers initially reported 13 dead, while later accounts placed the toll higher, making the wreck one of the deadliest railroad disasters in West Virginia history.
Historian Nathan Goff Carter later preserved an unusually vivid narrative of the disaster. His account begins before anyone aboard knew that the holiday journey was about to become a catastrophe:
“As old Number One of the Kanawha and Michigan rounded the bend just below Dunbar, the engineer noticed a white substance curling up from the crossties ahead. It had been cool in the valley that morning, and this looked like fog rising from the creek through the trestle. He thought no more about it, for it was Saturday, and he was making his final run of the week to Columbus, Ohio.”
“Number One had left Charleston at 7:30 that bright summer morning in 1891. The train, besides its engine, carried a baggage car and two day coaches, and the coaches were filled with a gay throng of passengers, all happy in the holiday spirit. Among those passengers was a large group from the Charleston Lodge of the Order of United American Workmen and their friends, bound for Poca to celebrate the Fourth. There were also many K and M employees going home to spend the day with their families.”
Contemporary reporting closely supports Carter’s description. According to an account published the following day, train No. 1 left Charleston at 7:30 a.m. with an engine, combination mail, express and baggage car, and two day coaches. Holiday fares were being offered along the line, and an estimated 75 to 80 passengers crowded the coaches. Members of a Charleston fraternal organization were traveling to Poca, while Kanawha & Michigan employees were headed home to their families.
Among the passengers Carter singled out was a young Charleston couple traveling with their infant child. Carter called them Walter Belcher and his wife, although surviving newspaper accounts generally rendered their surname as Welcher. The discrepancy is one of several differences in names and casualty figures that appear in accounts of the disaster.
“Walter Belcher and wife, a young couple from Charleston, who were also going on a holiday visit, attracted much attention. Between them sat their only child, a pretty blue-eyed infant, who persisted in climbing about, chattering, and affording amusement for all.
“The train sped along with the merry party of excursionists aboard, all laughing, joking, and enjoying the occasion, and just about the time that Engineer O’Connor had noticed the wispish ‘fog’ ahead, John Norvall got up and went into the baggage car to speak with the mail clerk. First, he said, there was a jar and a jolting, and he knew that the car had jumped the track. Seizing one of the rods, he hung on for life. In an instant, the mail car was jerked back on the tracks, and with a crash the day coaches broke loose.”
That detail, too, appears in contemporary reports, which identified the passenger as John E. Norville of Charleston National Bank. One account said Norville had gone forward to speak to the mail agent shortly before the crash. He grabbed a rod when the car began jolting and survived as the coaches behind him broke away. He was reported as the only passenger in the two coaches to escape without injury.
A trestle burned during the night
The wreck occurred shortly before 8 a.m. at a location contemporary reports identified as “Farm Station,” about eight miles from Charleston on the Kanawha & Michigan Railway. The exact location in today’s landscape has not been conclusively identified, but descriptions place the disaster near present-day Dunbar.
The trestle had caught fire sometime during the night. Contemporary accounts suggested cinders from a passing locomotive may have started the blaze, although the cause was never established with certainty. People living nearby reportedly saw smoke that morning but believed it came from fishermen’s campfires. O’Connor also saw it from his locomotive but mistook it for morning fog.
Several days after the accident, O’Connor gave an account explaining the terrible sequence. He said it was still dark when he first saw the smoke and that early-morning fog was common in the region. By the time he recognized that the trestle was burning, he believed the train was too close to stop. Instead, he opened the throttle in an attempt to carry the entire train across.
The locomotive and baggage car succeeded. The passenger coaches did not. Carter described what followed:
“A fire in the trestle had burned out a tie and loosened the rails, which spread and gave way just after the engine and baggage car had passed over. The cause of the fire was unknown. Just before daylight, a freight hauling Kanawha Valley coal had crossed the trestle and evidently dropped hot coals from the firebox.
“The coaches rocked and shook as they bumped along on the ties for thirty or forty feet, while women screamed and stout men turned pale with fear. The forward car rolled down the approach to the trestle, turned completely over and rested right side up some ten feet below. The rear car, which was on the trestle proper and had not reached the approach, rolled off the edge, turned bottom side up and fell on its roof some twenty feet below the track.
“In the terrible fall, many persons were crushed and bruised, but to add to the horror, the rear trucks which had remained on the track, now toppled over and fell. Some of the people in the car were creeping toward doors and windows trying to get out when this huge missile of iron and steel came hurling through the car.”
The mechanics of Carter’s account are corroborated remarkably closely by newspaper descriptions published immediately after the wreck. The coaches reportedly traveled about 40 feet over the ties after leaving the rails. One overturned and came to rest upright below the trestle; the other fell roughly 20 feet on the opposite side. A set of heavy railroad trucks then crashed onto the fallen coach, crushing part of the wooden car and killing passengers trapped beneath it.
Rescuers came from the surrounding countryside
The wreck left relatively few people aboard who could help the injured. Carter wrote that O’Connor, fireman Wyatt, mail agent Hayes, and Norvall joined wounded passengers who could still move and began pulling people from the wreckage. Norvall ran to the nearby county poorhouse to obtain sheets for bandages, while word of the disaster spread through the surrounding countryside.
“There were so many in the train and so few to help that it seemed almost impossible to do anything. As soon as the shock was over, those who could crawl out of the wreck did so. Then the four uninjured men, Engineer O’Connor, Fireman Wyatt, Mail Agent Hayes, and the passenger John Norvell, together with such of the wounded as were able, worked nobly to rescue their unfortunate companions. Norvell ran to the County Poorhouse, a short distance away, and secured sheets for bandages. The alarm had now been given, and people from the surrounding countryside poured in to help.”
Relief trains soon arrived. One came from St. Albans carrying doctors, followed by another from Charleston with additional physicians. The dead and wounded were eventually taken back toward Charleston, where news of the disaster had begun spreading through a city that had awakened expecting a holiday.
Carter’s account of what rescuers encountered is graphic, reflecting both the violence of the wreck and the unsparing style in which disasters were often described in the late 19th century.
“Several dead were taken from beneath the wheels, cross-beams, and springs, and presented a horrible appearance. Everyone of them had been struck on the head and literally squeezed until the bone framework of their bodies gave way and allowed them to sink down, shapeless masses of bloody flesh.
“The scene was horrible beyond description as a dozen or so corpses lay in a row, one of which had only the lower jaw on a headless trunk. Presently his head was found among broken seats and debris, carried up with brains dripping, and placed beside its body. Across the creek, scores of men, women, and children lay in the open field with broken arms and legs, heads, chests, and bodies cut, bloody and bandaged. The moans of the wounded mingled with the cries of those who had lost friends, and the sight of blood and carnage was sickening.”
Carter wrote that an elderly physician who had served during the Civil War compared the scene unfavorably with a battlefield. But amid the widespread death and injury, Carter returned to the infant who had been entertaining passengers only minutes earlier.
The child who survived
The young couple he identified as Walter and Mrs. Belcher were among those killed. Contemporary newspaper casualty lists likewise record Walter Welcher and his wife among the dead and report that their injured baby survived them. One account published the day after the wreck called the child’s survival one of the saddest incidents of the catastrophe.
Carter preserved a much more detailed account:
“But the most pathetic and touching of all was the Belcher baby, the fair, blue-eyed child whose antics had amused everyone in the rear coach just a short while before. Its parents had been killed instantly by the falling trucks, and the infant’s fingers were badly lacerated by broken glass. After the bleeding, torn fingers were carefully dressed, the little tot was laid on a basket beside its dead mother. Until then, not a tear had come into the big blue eyes, and the childish voice had not given utterance to a whimper.”
The surviving contemporary accounts establish the central facts of Carter’s story—the deaths of both parents and the survival of their injured child—but do not independently confirm every detail in his later description. His account nevertheless preserves something casualty lists cannot—the terrible contrast between the child playing among holiday travelers before the wreck and the orphaned infant lying beside its mother afterward.
A funeral train returned to Charleston
By about 1 p.m., a train carrying the dead and injured departed the wreck site for Charleston. Carter described nine bodies lying on cots beneath white linen in one car, while other cars carried the wounded. Contemporary reporting offers an almost identical account and notes that crowds gathered at stations along its route, waiting anxiously for word of friends and relatives.
“The funeral train which left the scene of the wreck about one o’clock presented a ghastly sight. As all coaches from the place had gone out to bring in an excursion, box cars had to be used. One car contained nine cots, each with a corpse on it, shrouded in white linen. In every car were numbers of injured, and in many of them the long forms shrouded in white indicated too plainly the result of the wreck. News of the disaster had spread, and at every station along the way people turned out to learn the fate of friends.”
Precisely how many people ultimately died has remained uncertain. The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche reported 13 dead the day after the wreck, while subsequent newspaper accounts placed the toll at 15 and later 17 as some of the injured died.
Two summaries published in 1892 still differed: Appletons’ Annual Cyclopaedia recorded 17 deaths, while a review of the year’s railroad accidents published in the North American Review put the toll at 18, with 48 people seriously injured.
One particularly haunting detail appeared in that 1892 review. A section worker ordinarily inspected the trestle every morning by walking across it, suggesting the railroad had a regular inspection procedure. The inspection, however, normally occurred about an hour after Train No. 1 passed the bridge. On July 4, the passenger train reached the fire-damaged structure first.
Carter ended his account not at the trestle but back in Charleston. The city had begun Independence Day decorated for celebration. By evening, its appearance had changed.
“Seventeen persons were killed in this great Fourth-of-July train wreck of 1891, and more than fifty injured. That evening in Charleston, many merchants who had decorated their buildings in red, white, and blue bunting in keeping with the spirit of the holiday, now added some black in mourning for the Fourth-of-July outing party which ended in tragedy.”