Through the interstices of the wreck arms and legs protruded in every direction.”Ī woman in her 20s in one of the first-class cars traveled with two or three bantam chickens. “The train was piled in such an inextricable mass of debris,” the Baltimore Sun reported, “that it was difficult to discover the outlines of human forms. (Another account said a window.) “He afterwards looked at the hole through which he had emerged,” a newspaper reported, “and wondered how he had ever got through it.” The general, apparently unscathed physically, assisted survivors until daylight and then lay down to rest. Longstreet, a large man, somehow squeezed to safety through a bottom of the sleeper car on the tracks. A survivor from North Carolina said the “cries and groans of the wounded and distressed baffled description.” Thankfully, the wreck didn’t burst into flames or this disaster could have been worse.Īccording to a report, “no pen or tongue” could adequately describe the horror. In the inky blackness, passengers frantically worked to free themselves from the wreckage or aid the injured. All lights on the train were extinguished after it plunged. Steam hissed from the crippled locomotive. Two sleepers remained on the track above the other sleeper, which also fell, rested precariously atop the crumpled wreckage below it.įrightened passengers, adults and children alike, moaned and cried. It dragged the four cars, followed by the tender and locomotive, into the vortex. As she stood near the doorway of her house, Jackson would wave her green-checkered, gingham apron at railroad workers, who would toss her apples and oranges from their lunch baskets.Īt 2:20 a.m., the train crept toward the middle of the trestle, which had been undergoing repairs.Īfter the locomotive and tender apparently made it across the bridge, the smoking car in the center of the trestle plunged through wooden beams and into the creek. To locals, the 470-foot bridge was known as the “Fat Nancy Trestle,” after a plus-sized African American named Emily Jackson, who lived near its western approach. as it approached the 44-foot-high, wooden Browning Trestle spanning rain-swollen Two Runs Creek below. Two miles south of Orange Court House, the train slowed to about 4 m.p.h. Taylor eased it out of the station on the Virginia Midland Railroad line. At roughly 2 a.m., “The Piedmont Airline” arrived with sleeping and groggy passengers in Orange Court House. Longstreet was in a sleeper car as the train snaked its way through countryside ravaged by civil war decades earlier. James Longstreet, sporting long, white whiskers, was returning from the Grand ReunionĪt Gettysburg when the train he was aboard wrecked at the "Fat Nancy" trestle. 52 consisted of mail, baggage, smoking and ladies’ cars, three sleepers, the locomotive (Engine 694) and a tender. The train, scheduled to make stops in Augusta, Georgia Atlanta and New Orleans, typically carried between 150 and 200 passengers. Fighting for Brigadier General Harry Hays’ famed “Louisiana Tigers,” Cortez was taken prisoner in Pennsylvania and not exchanged until early 1864. Cortes, a “whole-souled, open-hearted, compassionate man” who, as a 19-year-private in the 7th Louisiana, lost his left leg at Gettysburg. At least two other Confederate veterans were also aboard – including New Orleans-bound Louis G. 52 train, “The Piedmont Airline,” in Washington. “No man in Gettysburg,” a New York newspaper noted, was “more honored nor more sought than he.”Īt roughly 11 p.m., Longstreet boarded the southbound Virginia Midland Railroad’s No. The former lieutenant general was the star attraction on that hallowed ground where George Meade out-generaled Lee 25 years earlier. Sporting astonishingly long, white whiskers, Longstreet was en route to his home in Gainesville, Ga., from the Grand Reunion of Civil War veterans in Gettysburg. Die in a mere train wreck? Fat chance for Robert E.
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