FREDERICKTOWN — There’s a time and place for everything: College!
It was a frosty winter night around 1990. I was walking along the railroad tracks in Fredericktown to get some fresh air after an interesting evening of experiencing … um … let’s just say a certain illicit substance that made Howard Stern’s face on TV appear green to me, and made pizza taste like blueberry pie.
It was quite a night.
Something of a teetotaler during my teen years, I had decided to undertake this exploration with a couple classmates for literary and scientific purposes for a play we were writing (seriously!).
By midnight, we had somehow managed to get a pizza delivered without either terrifying the driver or getting the police called on us. (Which could very well have been the result, as the two unnamed friends, whom I will call here Dave and Steve, were tussling and breaking glass in the background while I answered the door amid the confusion.)
Somewhere around 2 a.m., the worst of the visual and audio distortions were past, and I was becoming restless with the whole experience. (Which is why I’ve never taken to either drink or drugs: I get bored with them before they run their courses!)
I decided that I needed to take a walk in the cool air to clear my head. My friends decided I was OK to take a walk, and let me go. I’m glad they judged that correctly.
I wandered through downtown Fredericktown, past the pizza joint that made the pie which tasted like blueberry, and turned down toward the railroad tracks. I walked along the tracks for a way, though a rocky cutting that suddenly isolated me from the town.
Just about the time that I was thinking this might be a tight fit if a train should come along, I heard the whistle of an approaching diesel train. Fortunately, there was a little indentation in the cutting where I could stand and watch the train go by, to my great joy, as I’ve loved watching trains ever since childhood. The intensity of the train’s passing seemed to pierce through the haze I was in, bringing me back to reality.
Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. Considering what I had ingested, there’s a slight chance the train was a hallucination of my altered perception. Whatever the case, I enjoyed the train without any problems, and then walked back to my friend’s house.
By dawn, the substance had run its course and I felt more or less normal, except for the occasional microsecond spinning feeling for the next week or so.
In retrospect, it was of course a spectacularly bad situation and set of choices that could have led to a tragic denouement that some other historian would be chronicling today in this column. But fortunately, that didn’t happen. (Don’t try this at home, kids. Do as I say, not as I did!)
Thus, you can imagine my surprise to find myself in the same spot more than 30 years later in relation to this column.
As you may have seen last week, I recently found a real photo postcard from 1912 that showed a train derailment in Fredericktown. At the time, I was unable to find any newspaper documentation for the event, but Knox County Historical Society director Jim Gibson searched further and found a reference to the event in the Sept. 27 edition of the Democratic Banner, one of the two Mount Vernon newspapers of the time.
Jim contacted me with the clipping, which was apparently written by the newspaper’s Fredericktown correspondent and mailed over to the Banner, thus accounting for the delay of over a week in reporting. The correspondent wrote:
Last Saturday morning about 5 o’clock a B. & O. freight train went tearing down the grade through this place, and for some cause or other jumped the track just north of the station with the result that six cars were ditched and another derailed. It was not long after the accident that a crowd of people were on hand to see the wreck and excitement.
The wrecker was sent up from Newark arriving here in about three hours and after working for another three hours the track was cleared enough to permit the passenger trains from the east and west to (go) on this way.
The work of clearing away the debris and making repairs to the track and other equipment has kept the wrecking crew busy here until Tuesday night, when the balance of the work was turned over to the local section hands.
Six of the cars were completely wrecked but much of their contents were saved. Mr. D.M. Brumback purchased a car load of salt, and a considerable amount of chicken feed was given away to those who cared to gather it up and take it away.
I posted the postcard last week not knowing the exact location, but readers on Facebook were curious. Annette Lamoure asked where it could have been, and Bill Combs suggested just off Main Street, on County Road 14, near the grain elevator. I decided to check out the spot Bill suggested.
Today the B&O Railroad line in Fredericktown is a paved bike trail, the Owl Creek Trail. I parked behind the old mill and examined the bike trail. I quickly recognized that this spot provided the exact background seen in the postcard: the wrecked cars were on a slight bank next to a body of water, while behind the tracks was a bluff upon which buildings could be seen.
Today, those particular buildings are gone, but the bluff is there, the tracks are now the bike trail, and body of water is the Kokosing River. The gradual rise of the bluff matches the postcard. The bank where the cars derailed has more trees now, but the landscape is otherwise much the same.
I quickly realized that the original photographer’s point of view was from across the river, so I crossed the bridge over the Kokosing on County Road 14 (also known as Upper Fredericktown Amity Road) and clambered down the bank. Just under the south edge of the eastern end of the bridge, I found what I think must have been the very spot where photographer L.D. Shipley stood on the morning of Sept. 21, 1912, and took the photo that appears on the postcard.
Soon a wrecker car (presumably a crane attached to a railroad flatcar) came and began picking up the derailed cars. One wonders if Shipley got any pictures of that?
I went back topside just as a pedestrian and a pair of bicyclists came through, headed north on the trail. I couldn’t resist calling out, “Hey, you know you just went through a trainwreck?” One of the bicyclists said humorously, “Oh, I should hope not!” as he tore past. The pedestrian stopped and looked at the postcard in interest before our conversation turned, as all Ohio conversations must, to the topsy-turvy weather.
After she continued on her way, I walked further south on the trail, getting to the cutting that can just barely be seen beginning on the left edge of the postcard. I could make out the hand-chiseled marks in the bedrock from when the cutting had been made around 1852 for the Sandusky, Mansfield & Newark Railroad, which was later bought out by the Baltimore & Ohio.
It was then that it began to look dimly familiar to me, recalling a strange night from long ago. I have to say that I had no recollection whatsoever of the river also being there, but then I may not have been in possession of my sharpest faculties that night in 1990.
As I returned to the trail’s intersection with the road, I realized I was seeing approximately the view that the train engineer must have been seeing just before dawn in 1912 when he realized that something was going very wrong just behind him as seven cars derailed.
There’s been a lot of adventure in this grade over the years. I just hope the statute of limitations has expired for certain stories I tell.
