The Saddest Event Newtown Has Ever Experienced

Henry M. Pownall was a well-known harness maker in Newtown at the turn of the century. He had a shop on Washington Avenue that also sold and serviced bicycles, sleighs and horse goods. He was a Prohibitionist, and an integral member of the M.E. Church who donated the lot for a new church and parsonage. He served in the Civil War for twenty two months, was a member of the local G.A.R. and was highly involved with Memorial Day services. He was a valuable member of Newtown, with a good family consisting of himself, his son Henry and his two daughters, Helen and Estella. Their mother, Amanda T Hellings, got sick and passed away in 1902.

Young Henry M. Pownall

1868 Pownall Ad

Pownall's Store on the corner of Washington and Court

In August of 1911, Henry and two of his daughters, Estella and Helen, went by train to Rochester, NY for the annual encampment of the National G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic). Henry was 64, Estella 29 and Helen 31. Their return trip was met with disaster, which led to what the papers called the saddest event Newtown has ever experienced.

September 2, 1911 Newtown Enterprise

The awful disaster on the Lehigh Valley Railroad at Manchester, N.Y., last Friday, but which twenty-eight persons were killed is brought closely home to Newtown by three of its well-known and highly-respected residents being among the victims.

Henry M. Pownall and his two daughters left Newtown on Saturday morning, August 19th, for Rochester, New York, there to attend the annual encampment of the National G.A.R. They went by way of Trenton, New York, by boat to Albany, and then westward to Rochester. It appears they visited Niagara Falls from Rochester, and it was there that they boarded the ill-fated train for their homeward journey. They were all in the first car that was thrown from the bridge down into the gulley, and it is probable that all three were instantly killed.

The papers of Saturday morning gave the name of Helen E. Pownall among the identified dead, and descriptions of two of the unidentified left little room to doubt that her father and sister were also dead and their bodies in the Shortsville morgue. Wesley J. Pownall, son and brother, and his cousin, Dr. E. E. Pownall, of Richboro, started for Western New York. Saturday morning and arrived at Shortsville in the evening. They had no difficulty in identifying all three bodies and arranged for their shipment to Newtown where they arrived on the 10:33 train Monday morning. The two men returned on Sunday. 

The triple funeral on Tuesday afternoon was the saddest event that Newtown has ever experienced. People came pouring into town all the morning, and by two o'clock in the afternoon Washington avenue was practically crowded with people notwithstanding the rain. The scene at their late home was one long to be remembered and the services were truly impressive...

Henry Pownall Trade Card

...Henry M. Pownall was nearly 65 years of age. Bown in Lumberville, this county, he had lived in Newtown since he was ten years of age. He had long been engaged in the harness making business in connection with which he kept a store for the sale of horse goods and other merchandise. He was a veteran soldier, having served in the Civil War for some twenty-two months, enlisting when he was only 17 years old, being a member of Company I, 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry, and was always proud of his connection with the army. He was a member of the T.H. Wynkoop Post, G.A.R., and was greatly interested in Memorial Day services. The boys of the town will always remember him for his generosity in procuring for them flags and banners for the line of march out to the cemetery. For many years Mr. Pownall had been a prominent member and officer in the M.E. Church, where he will be greatly missed. He was librarian in the Sunday school for a long time, but a few years ago resigned his other offices in the organization. Fraternally he was a member of Knights of Pythias and of the P.O.S. of A...

The worst wreck in the history of the Lehigh Valley Railroad occurred at 12:35 o'clock, P. M., on Friday last, the 25th, at Manchester, Ontario county, N.Y., some twenty miles east of Rochester.

Crowded with passengers, many of whom were war veterans and excursionists from the G.A.R. Encampment at Rochester, the train, made up of fourteen cars, drawn by two big engines, came from the West via Niagara Falls, which was forty minutes late when it reached Rochester Junction, and from there sped eastward to make up time before reaching Geneva.

Post 427 G.A.R. Ribbon

The engines and two day coaches had just passed the centre of a 400-foot trestle over Canandaigua Outlet, 150 yards east of the station at Manchester at 12:35 o'clock, when the Pullman car, Austin, the third of a long train, left the rails. It dragged the dining car with it and two day coaches and two Pullmans, in this order, followed.

All bumped over the ties a short distance, when the coupling between day coach No. 237 and the rear end of the diner broke. The forward end of the train dragged the derailed Pullman, Austin, and the diner over safely, after which they both plunged down the south embankment and rolled over.

The free end of the ill-fated Lehigh Valley day coach, No. 237, in which most of the victims were riding, shoved out over the gulf and followed by a Grand Trunk day coach, stripped the rear guard of the south side of the trestle and plunged into the shallow river bed more than forty feet below, some accounts give the distance of the fall at fifty and even as much as sixty feet.

The end of the first day coach that went over struck the east embankment with of solid masonry, an, with the other sixty-foot car behind it, both shot against the wall with terrific force. Both cars were filled with passengers.

Wreckage from the derailment

The cars lay a mass of crumbled wood, metal and glass, under which 100 men, women and children, many of whom were killed instantly, were buried. The greatest destruction occurred in the first day coach and a dozen persons were taken later dead from the second day coach, which, after following the first over the trestle, snapped its rear coupling and thus saved the rest of the train from being dragged along. 

The second day coach struck on the bottom and stood end up, the rear end projecting a few feet above the top of the trestle. All of the passengers in this car were piled in a tangled mess of broken seats at the bottom of the car.

Indescribable pandemonium followed. The Pullman car, Emelyn, which remained on the bridge with one end projecting over the gulch, and several cars behind it, derailed and in immediate danger of going over on the mass of wreckage below, were soon emptied of all their passengers, who, aided by gangs of railroad employees from the big freight yards at Manchester, a short distance away, rushed to aid. It was several minutes, however, before anybody reached the cars at the bottom to help the victims. The cars did not catch fire, and so that horror was spared.

Axes were secured and body after body was removed and carried by the rescuers knee-deep in the river bef to the bank on the west side of the trestle. There the dead and injured were laid out on the ground while planks and timber were requisitioned and a field hospital established. 

It was more than an hour before many of the injured could be removed, and special trains from both Rochester and Geneva brought physicians, nurses and medical supplies. A large number awaited treatment, and the railroad station at Manchester, a cider mill and an ice house were used to give temporary shelter and treatment to the sufferers.

It was necessary to chop through the sides and bottom of the day coach at the bottom and the work of removing the victims moved with painful slowness. Death had come swiftly to some of them, numerous of the dead having had their skulls crushed in when they were thrown against the car seats and projections. The mortality was high among the older passengers, most of whom were veterans of the Civil War and their wives.

The dead taken from the wreck were removed to a morgue at Shortsville, a small place on the railroad, east of Manchester. By 9 o'clock that night twenty-three bodies had been taken there. The morgue was the basement of a country furniture store and was illy adapted for the purpose. The wounded, some of them mortally, so were taken to hospitals at Rochester, Canandaigua and Geneva and to the sanitarium at Clifton Springs.

Including those who died in hospitals from their injuries, the number of dead, up to Sunday night was twenty-eight, and it seemed probable that several of the seventy-four injured in the above-mentioned institutions would succumb to their injuries...

Partial List of the Dead

..."The screams and shrieks of the dying and the grinding crash of splintering wood and twisted steel, as the great weight of the cars slowly settled was the most terrible thing I have ever listened to. I heard the grinding of the car ahead as it left the tracks, and was violently thrown against the seat. Somehow the passengers on our car were calm, and it seemed as through they had been trained for the occasion. The men stood courteously aside and allowed the women to pass out first, and when it is realized that all knew that our car was balanced in a dangerous position on the end of the Pullman it will be seen just what courage meant. Several  moments after we had all gotten out of the car I found myself with a Miss Hewitt, who told me she came from Germantown, working alongside one of the coaches which lay at the bottom of the stream. A young man was running about in circles, hardly knowing what do do. He had an ax which he had carried with him from one of the coaches in which he was riding and which did not leave the trestle. I directed him to climb to the top of the coach and start to chop through. Several moments later he succeeded in helping out a few of the injured, but most of those who had been riding in the car were dead. When all the doctors and nurses on the relief train arrived the confusion was such that could devote no time to removing the mangled bodies of the dead. It was necessary to walk over them to reach the suffering injured, whose cries filled the air. Miss Hewitt and I tore up our skirts and waists to give the physicians bandages. Then we went to the end of the trestle bridge, where a number of women were standing helplessly and made them do likewise. Most of the women who tried to help had to be carried back to the embankment, as the horribly-mangled bodies proved too much for their nerves and they fainted."...

...The Lehigh valley Railroad Company issued a statement Saturday which said that the accident was caused by a broken rail. It was broken into ten pieces, some authorities say seventeen pieces. A veteran who examined this rail said that he found an old fracture in it. The company's statement says that from information received the train was not exceeding the speed limit of 25 miles an hour at the time of the wreck.

I have a postcard that was mailed to Estella Pownall in 1906. Of her and her sister, the papers say.

Helen E. Pownall was a graduate of the Newtown High School and of the West Chester State Normal School, class of 1901, three member of which preceded her in death. She first taught in Pocopson township, Chester county, afterward in the Newtown borough schools, at Oxford, Chester County, and at Huntingdon Valley, Montgomery county. During the past year she had substituted in Girard College and at Oxford. Miss Pownall was a member of the M.E. Church, being assistant organist, and took much interest in its affairs. She was first vice president of the Epworth League and an officer in the Home Missionary Society.

Her sister, Estella was two years younger, and since their mother's death, more than nine years ago, had been her father's housekeeper, and was also his bookkeeper. She was a member of the M.E. Church and a teacher of the infant class in the Sunday school. Both were most estimable young women, whose sudden and untimely deaths are much lamented. 

After the accident, Wesley, son and brother of the deceased, moved into his father's home and picked up his business.

The Pownall parents and daughters are buried together in Newtown Cemetery. The mother was interred in Doylestown, and moved to Newtown when the family was buried. 

Another strong contender for the saddest event in Newtown is the story of Morell Smith.