N&W in 1910--Fatality

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Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 8:45 AM
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Subject: N&W in 1910--Fatality

 

Bluefield Daily Telegraph
July 12, 1910

 

THE GRAHAM DAILY NEWS

------

    The thirteen-year-old son of Chas. Gray, colored, of east Graham, was
run over by a freight train west of Graham and his body terribly mangled
under the wheels.  The boy was on his way to Falls Mills, where his father
was employed at the stone quarry of the Walton Company, when he met his
death.  It is presumed the lad had stepped from the westbound track to allow
a westbound train to pass, only to step in front of an eastbound train.  The
body was taken in charge by the section gang and as soon as his identity
became known his father was notified of the accident and came home and
conveyed the remains to his home.  Interment will take place today in the
colored cemetery in west Graham.

 

Well, not so surprising! Funeral Homes (as we know them now) are a
relatively late invention. And I suppose there wasn't that much help and
time available in emergency rooms just to pronounce somebody dead. Quite
frequently, families prepared the body for burial, and sometimes even made
the coffin themselves. I would think this was particularly common among poor
colored families. Later on, funeral homes got legislation passed requiring
embalming, and even where that was not the law, they made people think it
was required, just to get the business.    Jim Nichols

------

[It is surprising how many articles of that era in the Bluefield newspapers
reported that people were killed by stepping out of the way of one train
only to step in front of another on the double track.  Also, to us today it
is hard to imagine how common it was for a body to be taken directly to the
deceased's home, but that was often done according to many of the newspaper
articles of that time.] 

 

Gordon Hamilton

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