Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1904 — EXCURSION TRAIN IS WRECKED. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

EXCURSION TRAIN IS WRECKED.

Twenty-four Persons Killed and Seven-ty-Two Injured at Glenwood, 111. Twenty-four women and children were killed and seventy-two injured, forty seriously, in a collision between an excursion train loaded to the platforms with Sunday school picnickers from Doremus Congregational Church, Chicago, and a freight train near Glenwood, 111., at 6:46 o’clock Wednesday night The wreck was the result, of a misunderstanding of orders. The excursion train was coming north on the southbound track of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad when at a curve half a mile south of Glenwood it crashed into the rear end of a coal train. The baggage car was telescoped and the first coach completely demolished. Both cars were filled with children and old women.

The party of 750 picnickers was returning from Island Park, Momence. For ths most part the passengers were happy children and their mothers. Some were singing and some were asleep when the wreck came. , At the crash those in the rear cars of the eleven-coach train rushed for the doors or jumped through the windows, many being injured. In rout, the first two cars, crushed like egg shells, were crowded with dead and injured. The baggage car had been filled with ramping children. The roof of the first passenger -was rammed clear through it, poshing the cruelly crushed mass of humanity through the breaks in the walls. The first passenger car was torn to splinters.

Word was sent to Chicago Heights and Glenwood and relief parties reached the spot fifteen minutes later. The scene was a most fearful thing. Struggling masses of bodies could be seen through the openings in the cars. The dead and Injured were packed in together. The dead were terribly, horribly mangled, heads and limbs having been severed, and in the midst were the maimed and injured living. It was fifteen minutes before the first body was taken out. There was no screaming or wailing. The picnickers came to the aid of the workers who had arrived in large num-

bers. Eight physicians were soon on the scene. The enormity of the catastrophe did not become apparent until they started to take the bodies out. The passengers in two cars which were smashed were mostly mothers and their children. Families had stayed together. t Few in the other coaches had relatives among those killed. The lack of water caused much delay and a dozen mangled little ones breathed their last under the scrub oaks on the seat cushions. Fires were built to heat water. The farmers brought water in milk cans. The field hospital was operating among the piles of dead until 8 o’clock, when the last bodies which could be found were taken out and placed on a special train for Chicago.

Officers are searching for Edward Bowen, a negro farm hand, who disappeared shortly after the mysterious disappearance of the 14-year-old daughter of Perry P. Joseph, a farmer near Hollyville, Del. The father swore out a warrant after discovering a cabin in the woods which bore signs of a struggle In Its interior. Judge Beekman Winthrop was inaugurated as Governor of Porto Rico.

WRECK OF PICNIC TRAIN AND WHERE IT OCCURRED.