Salem Train Wreck was in Northville Township

While this week’s predicted scorching temperatures may keep more Northville residents indoors rather than outdoors, summer in Michigan is our season to enjoy the state’s boundless lakes and rivers, picnics in the parks, baseball, lawn games, reading (or nodding off) under the shade of a tree, and enjoying quality time with family and friends.

Such was the case on July 20, 1907 when 600 employees of the Pere Marquette Railroad along with family and friends boarded an 11-car train in Ionia for their annual summer outing at Detroit’s Belle Isle. It was a pleasant summer day, and families brought picnic baskets, blankets, playing cards, and games. Women wearing cotton lawn dresses and wide brimmed hats carried umbrellas to ward off the summer’s sun. Men donned straw boaters, and lightweight suit coats.

The Pere Marquette train, filled with summer revelers, left the Ionia station at 6 a.m. for the daylong excursion. By 9:15 a.m., as it crossed into Northville Township about a quarter mile east of Napier and north of Five Mile, the passenger train collided with a freight train that had left the Plymouth station and was heading toward Salem. The crash would leave 34 dead and more than a hundred injured. The scene at the crash site resembled a battlefield, and eyewitness accounts noted the carnage was unbearable.

Though the accident occurred in Northville Township, it has long been known as the Salem Train Wreck. More than a century after the crash, it still is regarded as Michigan’s worst passenger train collision. In 1907, it thrust Northville into the national spotlight.

Accounts of the accident were reported in local and national newspapers (including the New York Times). The inquest that followed the crash also generated national attention.  Among the most detailed accounts was the reporting in the July 26, 1907 Northville Record. Editor Frank S. Neal was among the hundreds who had rushed to the scene. Here is a portion of The Record's account:

Rushing down the steep grade four miles west of Plymouth shortly after 9 o’clock Saturday morning a special Pere Marquette passenger train, consisting of ten coaches and a baggage car, filled with employees of the road from Ionia, and friends, crashed into a westbound local freight train, piling the cars into a hopeless mass.

The wreck snuffed out the lives of 31 persons (eventually 34 perished), and seriously injured about 100 others. Six coaches and a baggage car were smashed to splinters.

The accident occurred in what is known as the Van Sickle cut (the land was at that time the Van Sickle farm), the road making a sharp curve between high embankments that block the view in either direction.

The passenger train . . . left Salem at 9:10 and was due in Plymouth ten minutes later, according to a statement by railroad officials.

Where the trains met there is a cut some twenty feet deep. Never was a more thorough job done in the way of demolishing rolling stock, and the wonder is that any of those in the six coaches shattered, some to unrecognizable masses of debris, managed to escape instant death.

Penned in like rats in a trap, without a chance of saving themselves, the occupants of the coaches were thrown hither and thither. In the twinkling of an eye, the trainload of happy excursionists were conveyed into a horrible morgue. The deafening roar as the two engines came together, the crashing of splinter timbers, the hiss of steam, contributed to make a scene of indescribable horror. Pandemonium reigned. Above the crash there came the groans of the dying, mingling with the shrieks of the injured. It was all over in a second. Those on the train were unable to describe the sensation. There was a sharp blast of the whistle, a grating as the airbrakes were applied, and then the crash.

The sound of the crash could be heard for miles around. Among the first to arrive on the gruesome scene were local farmers who came with sheets, pillowcases and shirts to use as bandages for the wounded. The first doctor on the scene was Thomas Henry, better known as Doc Henry. He drove the four miles from downtown Northville to the wreck site only to find his supplies exhausted in the first 10 minutes. Other Northville physicians who rushed to the scene were Dr. T.H. Turner and Dr. J.M. Burgess.

Hundreds of townsfolk from both Northville and Plymouth arrived to assist in any way possible. Some women used their petticoats and ripped off the hems of dresses to use as bandages until a relief train from Detroit carrying doctors, nurses and supplies arrived at the scene to begin transporting the most seriously injured to Detroit hospitals for treatment.

The dead were placed in the four undamaged cars and the shades pulled down for the return trip to Ionia. Other cars from Salem were backed up to the Ionia-bound cars to transport passengers back home. The entire City of Ionia was in stunned grief as those back home awaited word about friends and loved ones.

Photographer L.L. Ball, who had a photo studio in downtown Northville (and later Plymouth), was among the first photographers on the scene. His pictures are among the most graphic evidence of the wreck. He would later travel to Ionia to sell his photographs of the scene.

An inquest into the cause of the accident kept Northville in the limelight as those selected to serve on the inquest jury were among the community’s most prominent citizens. Named to the jury were Nelson C. Schrader, George Gillis, William H. Ambler, C.D. Clark, C.A. Sessions and A.K. Carpenter.  

The inquest began only days after the crash at the Princess Rink, a social hall located behind what is now the Marquis Theatre. The Princess Rink was likely among the buildings lost in a 1925 fire that destroyed much of the north side of the long-block of East Main Street.

While countless stories about the crash can be found in newspapers (The Northville Record as well as the Ionia and Plymouth newspapers are excellent sources) and books (such as Jack Hoffman’s Northville . . . The First Hundred Years), one of the most riveting accounts is the DVD produced by Al Smitley, former Northville District Library librarian, and Fred Shadko, a Northville Township resident and member of the Northville Township Historic District Commission.

The DVD, titled The Salem Train Wreck of 1907 — Joy & Despair in the Days of an All-too-common Tragedy, was produced in 2008 and includes years of research by Smitley, who scoured more than 25 newspapers and compiled some 230 pages of typewritten notes to tell the story. Shadko produced and narrated the DVD with local residents offering their voices as players in the story.

The DVD is available in the Local History Room at the Northville District Library. Copies for purchase may be available in the Friends’ Store at the library. Check with the store manager about availability.