Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 97, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1899 — SCORE ARE DEAD. [ARTICLE]

SCORE ARE DEAD.

Maine Excursionists Near Bar Har* bor Drowned by Collapse of a Pier. Twenty or more excursionists from various parts of Maine were drowned and forty-one others were injured at Mount Desert ferry, eight miles from Bar Harbor, Me., Sunday morning by the breaking of an old and weak slip. The Maine Central Railroad ran excursion trains from all over its line in Maine to permit of people visiting the warships of the North Atlantic squadron, which had arrived in the harbor from Newport, R. I. The trains were switched of the Boston and Maine road to the short line of the Maine Central, which at Mount Desert ferry connects with the small steamer Sappho, which plies between that point and Bar Harbor. The first train brought 1,300 persons, and as the croWd had been told by train hands that the steamer could not accommodate one-fourth of the number there was a rush for the ferry slip as soon as the train stopped. About 200 gained the decks of the steamer and as many more were on the slip, when with a crash that sounded like the explosion of a boiler the weakened stricture broke in two in the center and the people were swept off each end into the water. It was high tide at the time and the 200 people were penned into a box-like area of 20 by 30 feet and beyond the assistance from the people high above them on the wharf. Their only means of escape was by diving down five feet under the side wall planking and swimming to the shore. Few could do this, for the crowd was qanic-stricken, and the members of it fought like wild animals for their lives. The people on shore for several minutes kept crowding forward, forcing some fifty more upon the struggling mass of humanity in the water below. Forty-one of the rescued were so seriously injured that they required immediate medical and surgical attention, and they were removed to a hotel close by.