KENTWOOD, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – It was a cold and snowy night on Saturday, December 26th, 1903 in an area of Michigan that is now referred to as the city of Kentwood, near the intersection of 32nd Street and Broadmoor Avenue. Two passenger trains were carrying holiday travelers to their destinations the day after Christmas. The westbound train carried 75 passengers and the eastbound train had 125 aboard.

The trains hit around 5:40 pm. The westbound No. 5 train from Detroit was traveling down grade about 60 mph and the eastbound No. 6 train headed to Detroit from Grand Rapids was climbing a hill at about 40 mph. They collided, hitting head-on midway through a sweeping curve, three-quarters of a mile west of East Paris. On the inner side of the curve there was a high embankment, preventing a view of the track ahead.

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The East Paris crash been called one of worst railroad wrecks in Grand Rapids railroad history, having killed 19 people instantly and two later – and injuring 38.

The entire Baldwin family was killed instantly in the wreck in the No. 6 train. The family included husband Leonard (Len), wife Anna and their 10-year-old son, George. They had been heading home after Christmas and according to an MLive report, young George was playing with a penny bank he had gotten as a Christmas present. Another newspaper report said that they were laid to rest in a Portland Cemetery, laid side by side in one large grave. The husband’s parents were so distraught that they weren’t able to attend the funeral. The newspaper reported “The remains were brought in three hearses, making the most solemn procession ever seen in this section.”

The Muskegon Chronicle said in their December 28, 1903 article about the aftermath of the accident, “No. 6’s engine flipped completely over and came to rest upside down facing west. The boiler from No. 5’s engine was still standing like a silo in a trackside ditch (after climbing the wreckage of the other train)…The first car of the eastbound train smashed completely through the second and into the third.”

The Muskegon Chronicle had an interview with W.J. Barber who was on the No. 5 Pere Marquette train with his wife, two little girls and young son. Barber said, “The first thing I knew, I was going head foremost onto the seat in front of me. There seemed to be just a jam and a crash. That was the first thing I realized. I had no warning.”

After the initial jar and a lunge when the train went about three feet farther, Barber went “Over head and shoulders” and tried to hang on to his little boy. The lights only remained on for about ten minutes and then the train car went into darkness. Steam clouded the air after some pipes broke under the seats. Women and children were crying.

As soon as Barber saw there was no danger, he gathered his wife and children and took them down to the end door of the car at the rear. He credits the vestibule coaches for saving them because they were so heavy and said there were only two people who died on his train.

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Barber described the situation around him by saying, “Outside it was deathly cold and snowing and blowing something awful. The dead were taken into the day coach.”

Farmers had come to the scene to help pull people from the wreckage and axes were used to get into hard-to-reach areas.

Barber said, “My older little girl was very badly frightened and I could hardly keep her quiet. I was bleeding badly all the time about the nose and head, down over my little boy and that alarmed my wife and made her think the boy was hurt. Around us people were walking about with broken arms and their faces jammed in.”

Christmas presents, train parts, and baggage were scattered all over the tracks.

Barber said they waited in the parlor car for a little more than an hour until the relief train came and then they left about an hour after that. The wounded and the dead along with the survivors arrived in Grand Rapids about 8:30 p.m.

He described a huge crowd at the union depot in Grand Rapids. The crowd had heard about the wreck and came to meet up with the relief train. There were about 20 police officers holding the crowd back. About a dozen hospital nurses were there and men that Barber assumed were doctors walking around asking who needed help.

In explaining the accident, The Muskegon Chronicle said, “It was dark, snowing heavily and both trains were running late. The howling winds blew out a trackside signal light warning the crew of No. 5 of the onrushing No. 6. The station agent responsible for the signal watched in horror as No. 5 barreled past in the darkness. Knowing disaster was inevitable, he telegraphed the railroad’s headquarters and dispatched a rescue train before the crash occurred.”

In another news report, it explained, “Before No. 6 left Grand Rapids it was given a train order directing it to meet No. 5 at Fox Siding, two miles east of East Paris, rather than the usual meeting place of Oakdale Park. No. 6 got the order, but No. 5 passed the station at Alto before the dispatcher could finish writing the order. The dispatcher then sent the order to the McCords station. The telegrapher put his signal at ‘stop’ to indicate to No. 5 that he had a train order for it. Running in heavy snow and darkness the Engineman on No. 5 never saw the McCords ‘stop’ signal. He went through at a full sixty miles per hour. Not knowing he was to stop in just a few miles for the other train, he barreled on.”

The McCords operator later stated that the wind had extinguished his signal light. Not knowing that, he did not go out to try to flag down the train.

Pere Marquette officials blamed the weather and the mix-up in orders with the No. 6 train directed to meet the No. 5 at a different site, farther east than usual. One newspaper offered a different account of what happened. The January 1, 1904 article from Ogdensburg Advance and St. Lawrence Weekly Democrat New York said that the company’s investigation had No. 5 Engineer Waterman, his fireman and Conductor Neil all say that the signal lamp was burning – but it was a white light.

A woman named Caroline Sebring Eardley watched the accident happen from her house when she looked out the window while making dinner. She gave an oral account of what she saw that day to the Kentwood Historical Commission in 1975. She heard the whistle of the westbound locomotive and saw the lights of another train going eastbound. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t even report it to anyone as she had no phone and couldn’t leave her children.

A story in MLive said, “Farmers living nearby rushed to the area and began pulling people from the debris. Passengers and crew from coach cars further back, shaken but unhurt, began to help. Rescuers carried lanterns to see in the blizzard’s darkness. Word of the crash was broadcast by men who ran several miles to telegraph the line’s operations center…A special train with surgeons and wrecking derricks was dispatched and Grand Rapids hospitals (and funeral directors) were put on alert.”

The dead included people from all over the state including Lansing, Lowell, Detroit, Grand Rapids and Big Rapids. Some of them were so disfigured that there was little to identify them with and speculation about one passenger said they must be “that of a passenger or tramp.”

From its first day of operation on Jan 1, 1900 until taken over by Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad in 1947, the Pere Marquette Railroad was the state’s deadliest railroad. Over the course of their 47 years, 78 people died in 28 Pere Marquette train wrecks in Michigan according to the Muskegon Chronicle.

It was reported by the St. Paul Globe in an old news report that the Engineer of the No. 5 train, 54-year-old Frank H. Waterman, survived the accident because he was ejected from the cab. They said, “The very force of the twisting impact seems to have been the means of saving the life of Engineer Waterman. He was flung forty feet over the fence at the edge of the right of way…his fireman, was sitting on the opposite side of the cab, and he, too, was thrown clear of the pile of wreckage.”

Reports also say that Waterman was seriously injured about the head with lacerations and that he also had internal injuries.

Although Engineer Waterman, was cleared of any wrongdoing in the tragedy following a coroner’s inquest, it was reported by several different news sources that he abandoned his family later out of guilt. What is not known is when exactly he left and what happened to him. No investigation into his disappearance was reported. Did he really leave voluntarily? Did he commit suicide? Or did he just take a walk and maybe was killed by a distraught family member of a victim of the accident?

Accounts from family members who are descendants of Waterman have heard different stories about Frank’s disappearance over the years. One person heard that he disappeared before he was cleared. Another said he had gotten up from the family dinner table and walked out the door.

The family also says that his son Clayton, who was 10-years-old at the time of the accident, later tried to find his dad but was unsuccessful. His other son, Glenn, was 20 at the time of the accident and his daughter Frances was five.

Although it’s not known when Frank disappeared, research from ancestry.com has turned up a death certificate of Frank’s son, Glenn, who died two years after the accident of chronic pulmonary tuberculosis. Frank Waterman’s name is on the death certificate as an “informant,” the person giving the information for the document, and it lists his location as Clarksville.

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More research has uncovered that Frank’s wife Magdalena (Mattie) died just short of her 47th birthday of influenza in February of 1907, four years after the train accident. Her death certificate lists her as married to a Railroad Engineer. Records indicate that she died in Traverse City at the “North Michigan Asylum” which is now known as the Traverse City State Hospital. This corroborates a family member’s account of hearing that Mattie had been in a mental institution. It lists her at the asylum from May 31, 1905 until her death.

So what happened to the two younger Waterman children who were left without parents? One family member thought a sister of Frank’s had taken them in and another said it might have been some cousins. It’s yet another Waterman family mystery.

Sadly, there are no reports of a memorial in Kentwood at the scene of the accident to signify that anything happened in in 1903 but many families were forever changed that day.