Reflections - Bent, Zigzag, and Crooked

Glass Compote - Photo by Marilyn

Spence’s voice boomed in from the great room, interrupted my morning writing again, and received a quarter of my attention. “I got ‘Today in Ohio History.’”

“That’s nice, dear.” Spence updates his Rhino news website daily with historical facts so Google will place the website higher in search lists. Leaning an elbow on my bedroom desk, I scribbled an edit for the tabby-corgi Christmas story.

“December twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-six,” Spence’s voice thundered. “The Ashtabula River railroad disaster.”

An 1876 Ohio railroad disaster? Spence had my full attention. I tossed the pen, hustled down the hall, and caught him mid coffee slurp. “Show me the article.”

He gulped. “I cleared the tab.”

“Send me the link. Marilyn’s great-grandparents and their family were in an Ohio train wreck in the late eighteen hundreds. Maybe it was the same one.” I nibbled the remnants of a thumbnail. “Remember decades back when Marilyn and I went to an appraiser for an evaluation of her great-grandmother’s glass compote?”

“No.”

“The compote is connected to the train wreck.”

His eyebrows arched.

“I’ll email Marilyn and ask her.” I hustled off without thinking. If I had, I could have predicted my friend’s answer.

“My great-grandmother died in the train wreck coming from Summerfield, Ohio to Zanesville, Ohio.”

Duh. Though Marilyn lives in a Cleveland suburb, her relatives had lived in Zanesville.

* * *

Nathan Franklin Young, Marilyn’s great-grandfather, lived in Summerfield, Ohio. He married Caroline Shepherd and they had five children. A versatile man, Nathan had held several jobs—lawyer, barber, and a sawmill operator. He decided to go into the grocery store business with his younger brother George in Zanesville.

On Thursday April 4, 1895, seventeen-year-old William and fourteen-year-old Eva set out on their own to prepare the rental house for the family. The teenagers traveled westward in a passenger coach of the B,C & Z Railroad, known to the company as the Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati, but to locals as the Bent, Zigzag, and Crooked.

At the Summerfield station, Friday, April 5, 1895, while the B, C & Z steam engine hissed on narrow gauge tracks, Nathan’s great aunt Harriet gave Caroline a gift for their new home—a glass compote.

The family climbed into the only passenger-baggage car of No. 5, the short train. Caroline handed the boxed compote to ten-year-old Martha. She settled in the back of the coach with her twin Martin, younger brother Clifford, father, and four other passengers. Caroline, four-year-old Clara May, and stock dealer Henry Brown sat in the front. The train puffed black smoke and chugged out of the station about five-thirty in the morning.

Caroline had a premonition that she wouldn’t reach Zanesville.

* * *

Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati no 5-4-4-0-357f3f-640
Photo from public domain

“The date is April fifth, eighteen ninety-five, Spence.” I tapped his shoulder. He’d moved to his new desk in the guest room. “You can use the story for one of your ‘Today in Ohio History’ posts.”

“Great. Get me a link.” He crumpled a paper from his clipboard and tossed it into the wastebasket. “I’ll make a note on my calendar.”

“Can’t you just write your own summary of the wreck?”

“No.” He whirled his chair to face me. “Readers will think I made it up. I need verification.”

How hard could finding a link be? I had the date, the place, and the train company. Type them into Google and voila—plenty to choose from.

Three hours later with eyes blurry from the glare of white screen light, I wobbled into the guest room and admitted defeat. “No matter what I type, Google wants me to look at the Palestine train derailment or the Ashtabula River railroad disaster. I found plenty of train disasters. B, C & Z wrecks were not on the lists.”

Spence didn’t wheel around. “Humph.”

“And Wikipedia suggested I write an article to submit for review.” Leaving him at his work, I hatched another plot. Maybe Marilyn would write the article.

Instead of writing to Wikipedia, Marilyn emailed me excerpts from Bent, Zig-Zag and Crooked, A Narrow Gauge Railroad by Arley Byers. She also attached photocopy pages of a letter Nathan’s brother George Young wrote to Marilyn's aunt June on May 2, 1956. George had painstakingly typed the article about the train accident written in the April 6, 1895 Zanesville Times Recorder.

* * *

About six in the morning, after the short train departed from the Whigville station, the passenger coach wheels jumped the track. The coach didn’t uncouple. Though the engineer cut the steam, the momentum of the train pushed it onto the trestle. The coach turned sideways. It pulled the engine and tender off the tracks. The wooden trestle split and broke. The passenger coach, engine, and timbers plummeted forty feet into the ravine. The coach landed on its side. The engine turned end over end. It crashed bottom up through the side of the coach, pinning the engineer and the front passengers to the ground. Timbers showered down.

The people the engine had pinned didn’t survive. The engine cut Caroline’s leg from the knee down. Though rescuers amputated her leg and pulled her from the wreck, she didn’t regain consciousness. She died on the hillside. The train bell hit little Clara May’s head. She died instantly. The other three Young children escaped with bruises but carried the horror of the accident with them. Nathan suffered bruises and a smashed foot. The newspaper reported the foot would need to be amputated—an incorrect assumption. Marilyn’s great-grandfather kept his foot.

* * *

My computer dinged—an incoming email from Spence listed nine links. Heart pumping faster, I jumped up and hurried to his desk. “Did you find a link to the train wreck?”

“No. Those are the available B, C & Z articles.”

Heart drooping, I managed a weak “Thanks.” Dragging back to my desk, I mentally shook myself for being pessimistic. Spence, a headline reader, probably hadn’t read those nine articles. Perhaps one made a reference to the incident. I opened each one and read or, in some cases, reread. Alas, he was right. None of the internet articles mentioned the April 5, 1895 incident in which Marilyn’s great-grandmother had died. Wrecks were numerous and the company didn’t advertise its own failures.

The Zanesville Times Recorder did write about the wreck again on its fiftieth anniversary. This article mentioned the fate of the glass compote.

* * *

Martha, now married to Kelly Davis and called Mattie, still had the glass compote. In her hands, it took the forty-foot plunge without a single scratch. The newspaper claimed Mrs. Kelly Davis considered the compote “a valued possession.”

Another mistake?

One day, years later, Mattie told her husband, “I don’t want that compote in my house anymore!”

Kelly placed the dish in the garage.

When Marilyn’s family next visited her mother’s parents in Zanesville, Kelly quietly explained Marttie’s demand to their daughter Linnet. Without any fuss, Linnet carried the compote home in the car and set it in her living room. The glass compote remains on display in that living room to this day.

* * *

Marilyn and pages 130 - 131 in Arley Byers’ 1974 Bent, Zig-Zag and Crooked, A Narrow Gauge Railroad verify the train wreck. They aren’t on the internet. Newspaper articles of the incident are available in Zanesville Times Recorder archives online. But people need to register for a trial and/or pay a fee to read them. Whether or not Rhino’s “Today in Ohio History” features the B, C & Z train wreck with Marilyn’s relatives and glass compote on April 5, 2024 is a mystery.

I’ve marked my calendar for that date. I’ll be remembering Marilyn’s family and the glass compote.

 

Nathan Young Family 1894: Back Eva and Willie; Middle father Nathan, Clifford, and mother Caroline holding Clara May; Front Row twins Martin and Martha