Tuesday, March 29, 2016

100th Anniversary of New York Central Railroad Wreck Near Amherst

Willis Leiter postcard of the 1916 NYC railroad wreck
(Courtesy Ohiomemory.org)
Today is the 100th anniversary of the disastrous collision of three New York Central Railroad trains near Amherst, Ohio that took place early on the morning of March 29, 1916. Twenty-seven people died and almost 50 were injured in the horrible tragedy.

You can read excellent local coverage of the anniversary observance in the Amherst News-Times here, and in the Chronicle-Telegram here.

I thought it would be interesting to see how some of the local newspapers covered the disaster at the time it occurred, so I retrieved them from library microfilm. Below you will find the front pages of the Amherst Weekly News, the Evening Telegram and the Lorain Daily News. (Click on each for a larger version.)

If you look closely at the bottom photo on the front page of the Lorain Daily News of March 30, 1916, you can see that it is the same photo shown on the Leiter postcard at the top of this post.
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1 comment:

  1. Rick KurishMarch 29, 2016 at 3:04 PM

    Growing up in Amherst in the 1950s we would often ride our bicycles through Crown Hill Cemetery. It's a rather small cemetery on a hill at the end of Crown Hill Drive, off of South Main Street -- a beautiful setting really. We sometimes stopped at the burial location of the unknowns from the train accident. The burials are in a row and the only thing written on each marker, is UNKNOWN. If in fact, the names are now known, it would be nice to list the names on a marker with the date of the accident.

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