(RAILROADS) Beers Leroy A Diary describing two train wrecks

Sale 2344 - Lot 219

Price Realized: $ 1,024

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Estimate: $ 250 - $ 350

(RAILROADS.) Beers, Leroy A. Diary describing two train wrecks, with a pair of grisly photographs. Autograph manuscript memoir / diary, [96] pages. 4to, cloth-backed boards, minor wear; signed by the author on page [13] and the inside rear cover * Pair of albumen photographs, 4 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches, on original card mounts with Philmont, NY backstamps. Philmont, NY, 1903-04

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Leroy Ambrose Beers (1886-1946) of Philmont, Columbia County, NY was 15 years old at the time of the first wreck, which occurred near his home on 1 March 1902. A freight train rode into a twenty-foot washout, killing all three crew members. Beers "ate my dinner hurriedly and arrived at the scene"; his description of the bodies, wreckage, and looting runs to three pages. The two photographs show the wreckage, including one corpse pinned under the debris. Beers was a passenger in a second wreck later that year on 2 August 1902, described in 5 harrowing pages. He was on a crowded excursion train which collided into a stalled train at Rossman's Station, NY: "I had just said, Suppose this car should run into another one going at this speed, no sooner had I said it when there was a terrible crash, our car left the track and went bounding over the trees." Two were killed and hundreds injured.