Weekend Steam: Not So Good-Old-Days

The Spring, 1950 "Farm Album" has this sad photo of a common event from the Good-Old-Days." Leroy Blaker, Alvordton, Ohio submitted the photo, and a newspaper article from the Hudson Post Gazette (Michigan), which tells about this fatal accident in July, 1886.

"A new 10 H.P. Advance No. 456 steam engine and the first to be seen in this vicinity was headed for a field just east of Hudson. As the engine passed the Brown school house, a small boy asked his mother if he might ride on it. She consented but made him promise to jump off when he reached the bridge. As the engine approached the bridge the boy scrambled back over the boiler and on to the water wagon where he dropped off as the engine touched the bridge. While the boy watched, the engine plunged through the wooden timbers into Bean Creek, carrying the driver and the engine tender with it.

The boy turned and fled for home, where he told his mother the engine had broken through the bridge. She asked if anyone was hurt and he replied he did not know. She then sent him for his father...and the men hitched a team to a wagon and headed for the accident.

The young boy ran back through the fields beating the men to the scene, and found a small crowd assembled, who were hurriedly searching the wreckage for him, since they had been told by the driver that the boy was with them, and there was a hat identical to the one the youngster was wearing floating in the water. The hat later proved to be the one belonging to the man killed.

The engine tender, who was killed was Michael O'Riley, and the driver of the engine who was injured was Jim Donnelly. The boy who obeyed his mother and jumped off, thereby escaping certain death, is Dan Brown, who was nine years old at the time....

The engine was later restored to use by Johnny O'Riley, brother of the deceased, and was used for many more years."