CHAPTER 12

Wreck of the Old 97

DANVILLE

It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,
And the lie was a three-mile grade,
It was on that grade that he lost his air brakes,
And you see what a jump that she made.

He was going down the grade making 90 miles an hour,
When his whistle began to scream,
He was found in that wreck with his hand on the throttle,
He was scalded to death by the steam.

—“The Wreck of the Old 97”

ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1903, the train known as the “Old 97” flew off a bridge near Danville, Virginia, and smashed into the ravine below, horribly killing eleven people who had been on board and injuring seven others. It was one of the worst train wrecks in the history of the state and, within a few years, became one of the most famous in the country as the result of a song about it that became the first record in the United States to sell more than a million copies.

Mail-and-express train No. 97, consisting of four cars and locomotive No. 1102, was one of the “Fast Mail” trains run by the Southern Railway under contract to the U.S. Postal Service. It ran 640 miles from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, Georgia, and was on the leg that went from Monroe, Virginia—176 miles southwest of Washington—to Spencer, North Carolina, a route that passed through Danville. No. 97 had started its run late and was an hour behind schedule when thirty-three-year-old engineer Joseph A. “Steve” Broady climbed aboard at Monroe for the leg into Spencer, another 166 miles down the track, where it would pick up a new crew. For every minute it was late into Atlanta, Southern Railway would forfeit a substantial amount of money to the Postal Service, which would not reflect well on the engineers, whether it was their fault or not. And so, Broady ran the train hard, and tried to make up for lost time.

Despite the folksy name commonly attributed to it, No. 97 was not actually that old when it met its end, and was one of the workhorses of the Southern line. Its engine was one of the best available, a ten-wheeled model produced by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. It carried no passengers, just eighteen crewmen and postal workers, and earned its keep by fulfilling the terms of its owner’s $140,000 annual contract to carry mail south from the nation’s capital to Atlanta.

While the claim that it was “the fastest regularly scheduled train in the world” might have been a bit of an exaggeration, No. 97 did maintain an average speed of nearly forty miles per hour and had a reputation for never being late. The normal time allotted for the run from Monroe to Spencer was four hours and fifteen minutes, which the train accomplished by maintaining an average speed of 39 miles per hour. If Broady wanted No. 97 to be back on schedule by the time he reached his destination, he would need to cut the time to just three hours and fifteen minutes and to run the train at an average speed of at least fifty-one miles per hour—which would be a trick, to say the least, in the rolling country ahead of him, which included many steep grades and tight curves. Signs posted along the route warned engineers to watch their speeds.

Broady did his best, blazing through at least one intermediate stop normally made during the run. It is not known for certain how fast he was driving No. 97 as it approached Stillhouse Trestle, the bridge that would carry it across the Dan River into Danville. Witnesses claimed it was going anywhere from thirty-five to eighty miles per hour, with the most likely estimates being closer to about fifty miles per hour. Any of those speeds but the very lowest would have been too fast for the curve leading down the steep, three-mile grade onto the bridge.

As he approached the curve, Broady discovered with horror that he did not have enough air pressure in his brakes to slow the train sufficiently. In desperation, he reversed the engine in an attempt to lock its wheels so as to slow or stop the train and sounded its shrieking whistle, in order to alert the crew to apply the hand brakes on the cars. It was all futile, however, and as train No. 97 struck the curve at high speed, it flew off the tracks, splintering a telegraph pole and tearing through the wires that ran parallel to the tracks. It then went soaring out into the air, its whistle screaming as if in mortal terror.

Engine 1102 traveled about one-hundred feet through open space and then crashed into the rocky creek bed in the ravine forty-five feet below the trestle. Its four cars followed and smashed into it in turn, piling up onto the wrecked engine and each other.

Of the eighteen people on board, ten were killed in the wreck, including all five of the train crew, four postal clerks, and a “safe locker” employed by the railway; seven were injured, all of them postal clerks, one of whom succumbed to his wounds nine days later; and one, an express messenger, escaped without being hurt at all. The injuries to the killed and wounded were horrific, and many of the victims were dying when people arrived at the scene of the wreck and tried to pull victims out of it.

“The three men in the engine were so badly scalded by hot water and steam that they were all the same color,” witness J. E. Lester recalled years later. “It was a horrible experience.” The two mangled and scalded firemen had been ejected from the left side of the engine and appeared to have died quickly. Broady was still alive when he was flung from the engine and landed in the creek bed next to it, but was horribly injured; his skin peeled off as witness John Wiley pulled him away from the wreck and he died right afterward.

No. 97 flew off the tracks and careened into a creek bed forty-five feet below after hiting a dangerous curve at high speed.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Southern Railway disavowed any responsibility for the wreck, claiming that it had not encouraged Broady to make up lost time and that he had been going too fast and was alone to blame. It is the railway that would have been penalized if the train had arrived late at its final destination, of course, and it is a sure bet that its engineers were always under pressure to ensure that No. 97 arrived in Atlanta on time. A coroner’s inquest held in Danville three days after the tragedy determined that its cause was excessive speed, but allowed that it could not say whether that speed was the result of human error or mechanical failure.

In the years following the wreck of the No. 97, people began to see strange activity in the ravine below the bridge, including what appeared to be lantern lights moving around in it, as if carried by people searching for the survivors of a crash. Stillhouse Trestle was used for another dozen years after the wreck, until the Southern Railway mainline was shifted about a mile east in 1915. However, even after the trestle was removed and the ravine became so overgrown with vegetation that people could no longer pass easily through it, the phantasmal lights were still seen. And, even though trains no longer passed anywhere near the site, people nearby were sometimes shocked to hear the shriek of a train whistle near where No. 97 sounded its last blast.

People also began to talk about “the Curse of the Old 97,” which seemed to strike any endeavor whose owners sought to benefit from the legacy of the misfortune. One of the most well-known examples of this is the case of the Old 97 Steak House. This eatery was established by an aspiring restaurateur in nearby Witt, Virginia, in the renovated and expanded Fall Creek Depot, which the No. 97 had sped past just minutes before reaching Stillhouse Trestle. It was a going concern in the early 1990s but, after it burned down mysteriously several years ago, it was never reopened.

My wife and I arrived in Danville on the evening of January 30, 2007, checked into a hotel on a hill just off Route 58 overlooking the Dan River valley, and immediately started asking around about the wreck of the Old 97 and ghost stories associated with it. Ironically, almost every single person we talked to—including Colie Walker, night cook at the restaurant affiliated with the hotel we stayed at, who we chatted with the most that evening—was familiar with the stories, but also told us that the site had been quiet for a long time and that if we were looking for ghosts we should instead visit nearby Berry Hill Road (which we did, it being the subject of its own chapter in this book). No one was denying that the site was haunted, mind you—a widespread attitude that surprised us—just that nothing had apparently happened at it for awhile.

One of our original sources of information about places associated with the wreck was the official “Virginia is for Lovers” tourism Web site, which mentioned two relevant points of interest: the site of the wreck itself, marked by a historic placard, and a mural on a building across the river that commemorated the wreck and the deaths of the railway and postal workers killed in it. The morning after we arrived in Danville, we got up and headed down Route 58 to the bridge that would take us across the Dan River into the historic downtown of Danville, where we found the mural painted on the side of the building at 310 Main Street.

A visit to the forty-foot-tall, seventy-five-foot-wide mural completed in 2005, seemed an appropriate way to set the tone for our investigation that day. The mural consisted of three elements, the largest of which depicted No. 97 in all its original glory. A smaller panel to its right showed the remains of the engine in the ravine beneath Stillhouse Trestle. From an inset oval panel, depictions of the five crewmen killed in the wreck stared out at us.

From there, we followed directions to the address where, according to the tourism Web site, the wreck had occurred and was marked. These took us several miles to the west of town, back across the river to its north side, and up a hill to a visitor’s center. Something did not seem right, and we certainly could not correlate anything in the surrounding hilly terrain with what we had read about the wreck.

Suffice it to say that the address on the Web site had been wrong, and that the ladies working in the visitor’s center pointed us in the right direction. We still needed to make one more stop for directions while working our way back down Route 58 east toward where we had started, but ultimately ended up in the little parking lot of a Supertest gas station, which stood just a short distance from the historic marker we were seeking and overlooked the ravine over which Stillhouse Trestle had once crossed. We were not far from the bridge we had taken into Danville a little earlier and almost directly across the river from where the mural was located.

Other than the historic marker—which incorrectly identifies the number of killed as nine, rather then the actual eleven—there is not too much to see at the site today, which bears little resemblance to how it looked in 1903. Diane dutifully waited in the car while I took some pictures, clambered part of the way down into the ravine, and then went into the little gas station store to ask some questions. The man working behind the counter just laughed when I asked him if he had ever seen anything that might suggest the site was haunted.

Whatever ghosts are associated with the wreck of No. 97 are, it would seem, quiet for the moment, and perhaps they have gone on to their eternal rest and will never be heard from again. The site where the ill-fated train met its end is, nonetheless, a desolate one, and I would not be at all surprised to see lights moving around in the tangled ravine some starless night, or to hear again the spectral shriek of a whistle on the anniversary of the catastrophe.