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The congressman and our worst transportation disaster

by Jack Neely

The worst transportation disaster in East Tennessee history happened a century ago this month. There were no national-threat warnings, but Americans of 1904 knew they lived in a permanent condition red, a constant threat level far more dangerous than anything Americans have to deal with in 2004.

Americans had a deadly, invisible enemy. They called it Fate. It seemed to have something against us. The president never declared war on it, but Fate struck repeatedly and mercilessly: smallpox, saloon shootings, food poisoning, diphtheria, stabbings, typhoid, fire, alcohol poisoning, syphilis, runaway horses; steam engines that blow up or, occasionally, collide with other steam engines.

Few felt as immune to Fate as Judge Henry Gibson. Approaching his 67th birthday, already past his life expectancy in 1904, he told friends he was confident that he would live to the age of 100.

On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 24, Gibson walked into the still-new Southern station downtown and boarded the train, the eastbound number 12. His fellow passengers probably recognized him, or, even if they didn’t, noticed him. He was unusually small, hardly more than five feet tall, maybe a few ounces over 100 pounds. The old man was sometimes known to wear children’s clothes. He wore his luxuriant mustache long.

Those who read the papers knew him as the 2nd District’s retiring Republican congressman. His enemies, and some of his friends, called him egocentric and arrogant. Cartoonists lampooned him as a Napoleonic officer with a long sword that dragged on the ground.

He was, at least, polite. He preferred the non-smoking cars but moved his seat several times, offering his optimum seat to the women who got on the train. The old man finally settled for a seat in the men-only smoking section of the second day coach.

He had a speech to give in Russellville, in Hamblen County about 50 miles to the west. It was election season, and though Gibson wasn’t running for re-election after a decade in the House, he took his duties seriously enough to give up a Saturday to get on a train and make a speech. Once he finally found a seat, he bent over his notes; it wouldn’t be a long trip.

Gibson was part of an unbroken chain of Republican congressmen that link the Civil War Republicans and Jimmy Duncan. Even in Gibson’s time, journalists found the 2nd District’s all-Republican record remarkable.

Originally from Maryland, Gibson had studied law in New York. He had a desk job in the Union Army, moved to Knoxville after the war, and gained a post as a bureaucrat in the Brownlow administration. He’d helped draw up the state’s new, post-slavery constitution in 1870, and he distinguished himself by refusing to sign the final draft, purely because it included a poll tax intended to prevent blacks from voting.

Gibson became editor of the Daily Chronicle, then the only Republican daily in the South. All the while he was a lawyer known for his skillful arguments. He was a partner of Leonidas Houk, our Republican Congressman until his sudden death after accidentally drinking arsenic in a downtown Knoxville drugstore. Houk’s son had succeeded him in the congressional seat, until Gibson decided to vie for the Republican nomination in 1894. It was an ugly campaign, in which Gibson and John Houk’s degrees of loyalty in the war, 30 years ago, were unexpected issues. Houk, himself too young to have fought, claimed that Gibson, though a Union officer, was actually a Confederate sympathizer, and had written “rebel poetry” during the war. In the Republican Party, absolute loyalty to the Union cause, without taint of sympathy for the treasonous Confederates, was the emblem of patriotism.

Gibson won anyway, and kept a low profile in Congress. He took care of his constituents, gained Knoxville river-port status and a training camp for Spanish-American War recruits. Once he spoke sharply against seating a congressman from Utah who was reputed to have three wives. After a few more speeches, though, Gibson was retiring, to spend some time writing poetry.

As the train approached a curve this side of the first stop, New Market, Gibson heard a loud crunch ahead. The car he sat in shook and lurched. It was off the tracks, he could tell, bumping along the ties, and then it split, spewing cinders into the car. The seat in front of Gibson’s crushed into his own, and he found himself pinned by the ankles.

“The general aspect was a mass of human beings, backs of car seats...suitcases, grips....” What struck him, after the horrible noise, was the almost perfect silence. Almost everyone in his car was dead. In the whole car there was not a sign of life except for one young man “struggling out with a wild look in his eyes.”

Gibson painfully wriggled out of his crushed seat, and crawled out a window. He sat, nursing his wrenched back and sprained ankles and looking at his watch. He heard nothing at all for three full minutes. That silence, he said, was the strangest thing. Then there was a woman’s moan. The noise came from another, smaller train, that had collided with the number 12.

What happened became known in history and song as the New Market Train Wreck. At least 64 died, that day or soon after, of injuries sustained in the collision. Some claim the number, suppressed by the railroad, may have been as high as 113. It was at the time the deadliest train wreck in the history of the South. It was allegedly caused when the conductor of the westbound train, anxious to get to Knoxville in time to see a harness racing event, ignored orders to pull over at a side track and let the 12 go though.

Gibson recuperated at his son-in-law’s house in Knoxville. Then he retired, on schedule, to a life of writing unusual poetry. “The Ban of Balberdane,” a poem based on messages from other planets, was 500 pages long. In retirement Gibson grew a white beard and favored a bathrobe and a black skullcap. In photographs, the former Republican congressman looks like an Eastern mystic.

He died in Washington in 1938: it was five months after his 100th birthday.

September 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 38 © 2004 Metro Pulse