Category: Community Studies

Disasters Are Part of a Community’s History and Should be Remembered

disasters are part of a community's past
The FB Memorial Page for the PSA Fligh5 182 which went down in San Diego Friday, September 25, 1978. https://www.facebook.com/PSA-Flight-182-Memorial-149177461803120/timeline/?ref=page_internal

A story about the passage of 37 years since a sudden, life-shattering tragedy hit San Diego came up in my Delmarva Newsfeed yesterday.

On Friday, September 25, 1978, a beautiful, sunny southern California Day, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) Fight 182 was on final descent into the airport when it collided with a Cessna.   Thirteen seconds later, the Boeing 727 smashed into the ground.

In those unimaginable few seconds, 144 people perished in the widely observed incident that morning at the end of the workweek.  So many lives (family members, the community, and the first responders) were shattered at that moment.

A moving FB memorial page and an article from the aviation news site, NYCAviation reminded me of a similar experience in Cecil County with the “flight 214 Remembrance Program.”  On December 8, 2013, family members. the community and first responders paused to mark the passage of 50 years since the Pan American World Airways crashed at the edge of Elkton.

The purpose of our program was to honor the memory of those who died when the big plane exploded in flight and went down in a cornfield.  It also honored the emergency personnel answering the alarm as periodic flashes of lighting illuminated a scene that would live with those firefighters and police officers throughout their lives.  As that day in 2013 marked the passage of a half-century, we invited those affected to come together to honor the memory of those who perished and the generation of emergency personnel who answered the call.

The experiences of the two communities, Elkton and San Diego, were similar in that unimaginable disasters struck, altering the lives of so many people.  For the Elkton community, no one living here would forget the sudden explosion in the sky on a stormy Sunday night in Cecil County as a thunderstorm swept through the area.  For the firefighters and police officers, It was something they, too, would never forget as they desperately searched for survivors in the cornfield.  One firefighter from the North East Volunteer Fire company, Steward W. Godwin, fell in the line of duty that night—while combing the debris field, he suddenly collapsed and died.

In San Diego, the PSA Flight 182 Memorial Committee is working to have a maker placed at the crash site.  As the group noted, “PSA 182 is a major part of San Diego’s History.  The memory of that day is still vivid in the minds of many San Diegans and continued to affect them as well as many of the first responders who were on duty  . . .  Our hope is to create a memorial that will honor the victims, their families, the neighborhood, and the law enforcement and emergency workers that still live with the memories of what they saw that day.  The memorial will be a place of peace and reflection that can be visited . . . .”

Late last night, I looked over the committee’s FB page as they get ready to gather on the 37th anniversary of the incident this Friday, September 25, at 9:02 a.m. in San Diego.  For those in Elkton who answered the call and for the family members on the Maryland crash, this is something we relate to as you read the posts, remarks, and comments.  It was a moving experience reading the page, and I hope to read soon that they have the support of the City and can place a memorial on the crash site.

In Elkton, Mayor Joe Fisonia, several years before he was elected to public office, had a memorial placed on the site here.  At the time, he was the president of the homeowners association in the area, and he is also a first responder with the Singerly Fire Company.

A sudden, horrible tragedy of this scope is part of a community’s history, as the San Diego committee noted.  It is a part of Elkton’s history too.

Program on Business History Looks to Past to Consider Present and Future

Conowingo Power Company Linemen in Elkton
Conowingo Power Company linemen sometime in the 1950s. Source: Lewis George

In a lively, interactive program the Cecil County Public Library examines the history of business and economic development in the county.  Historian Mike Dixon leads this discussion, as we look back through the centuries to consider the intersection of the past with the present and the future.

The free program takes place Wednesday, October 21, at 7 p.m. at the central library on Newark Ave., Elkton.

Cecil always occupied the most strategic of locations at the head of the navigable waters of the Chesapeake, midway between the emerging cities of the northeast corridor.  The roads, rivers, creeks, and productive farmland, created a bustling economy.  Entrepreneurs also harnessed the ample power of rapidly flowing creeks spilling down from the Piedmont to drive water wheels for mills of various types.

As time advanced, the transformative dynamics of the transportation and industrial revolution emerged, as the pre-electrical age’s dependence on waterpower faded.  These sweeping changes, involving the slow transition from an agricultural society to one more oriented toward manufacturing production, came together to give Cecil a surprising number of 19th-century manufacturing operations.  The era of mechanization found industrialists capitalizing on Cecil’s resources to establish large paper mills and the county benefited from the significant capital investments.

Prest-o-lite Manufacturing in Elkton
Prest-O-Lite dissolved acetylene in Elkton very early in the 20th century.
Source: Historical Society of Cecil County Online Collection
http://teachers.ccps.org/moore/HSCC/photo%20home.html

In the 20th century, external national and international forces influenced the county’s business climate.  During World War I Cecil experienced its first war boom, with construction starting on a large munitions plant.  That was followed by a boom associated with the Second World War, which saw the creation of the Bainbridge Naval Training Center and munition plants in Elkton.  This industrial complex employed some 12,000 workers in a county with a population of about 27,000 people

There were other types of booms, too. Right in the middle of the Great Depression, the Elkton marriage mill saw marrying parsons doing over 100 weddings a day as cupid created a highly profitable business environment.  Then in the 1920s a large hydroelectric plant forever altered the Susquehanna, as old villages vanished under the water of Conowingo Lake.

Novel political, economic, and social forces affected the county in the second half of the 20th century.  The Interstate Highway, suburbanization, and public policy directives were some of those, and there was always that matter of being in a corridor that was becoming crowded.

These broad business patterns will be discussed in this informative program as Dixon uses the historian’s lens to contemplate how the past, present, and future are connected.

Click here to register for the free program.

Armstrong Stove Works was a major business in Cecil County
Armstrong Stove Works in western Cecil County.

Historical Research into a Railroad Disaster: Greenwood, Delaware

A house destroyed in the greenwood diasaster, a train wreck.
A house was damaged in the explosion. Source: Greenwood A Delaware Town from the Collection of the Greenwood Library

Recently I have been researching a deadly Delaware tragedy that spurred a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad to push for national safety transportation regulations.  Following several accidents involving powerful explosives, including a catastrophic one in Greenwood, DE, the Bureau of Explosives was created under the American Railway Association.

The Sussex County disaster occurred over a hundred years ago, on December 2, 1903.  During a blinding snowstorm, two trains collided in the center of the town of 367 people.  One pulling a lethal cargo of dynamite and naphtha exploded, the blast and fire severely damaging the Sussex County community of 367 people.

Because of the growing number of catastrophes, James McCrea, who would become the eighth president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1907, urged carriers to adopt regulations to promote the safe transportation of explosives.  The Bureau of Explosives (BOE) was created under the American Railway Association in 1907.  With a chemical laboratory and 16 inspectors, the BOE immediately took the lead in inspecting shipments, encouraging improvements in shipping techniques, and developing rules that formed the basis of modern regulations of hazardous shipments.

Throughout the remainder of McCrea’s life, he had vivid recollections of the deadly detonations at Greenwood and elsewhere, which “had caused the death of many people, injury to many others, and had cost the Pennsylvania railroad many thousands of dollars.”  Twenty-seven years later at the annual congress of the National Safety Council in Chicago in 1930, the tragedy was still being discussed in the official proceedings.

Having incidentally heard of the Greenwood Delaware Railroad Disaster in a few widely scattered secondary sources over the years, I wanted to better establish the broad framework and narrative of what appeared to be a major catastrophe in rural Delaware at the top of the 20th century.  But there was little material conveniently available, and a Google search turned up only one hit. a genealogy website that had abstracted some information from newspapers.

So with my interest sparked and my research question framed, it was time to launch an investigation.  Naturally, being a curious type, this is the kind of work I enjoy doing as I start a new study and begin my search for evidentiary fragments from the largely forgotten past.

My first step is always a review of the historical literature.  This enables me to see what has already been done, and that often yields powerful results.  But in the case of Greenwood, there wasn’t much secondary or primary material easily available.

My second step is to visit the community for a field observation as I look at the intersection of the present with the past.  Surviving traces of earlier times exist, and exploring the built and natural environment facilitates understanding.

As I delve deeper into the past from that point, I move into archival research and interviews.  Depending on the purpose of the study, this may include a wide range of materials — written, printed, or digital.  The search for physical records includes letters, newspapers, diaries, photographs, maps, and much more   One seldom knows where the information will be discovered as you start on the trail to find clues to the past.

While much of the material will be found in libraries, archives, special collections repositories, and local government offices, it usually is far from obvious where your data will come from.  There are private papers in homes ranging from notes and letters to entries scribbled in diaries.  Sometimes there are typed manuscripts containing memories of the community’s elders, but tracking these down means poking around to make contacts in the place you are visiting, as that material is often in basements, vaults, closets, and attics.

It also means leveraging unconventional techniques as I make my interest widely known in the community.  That process usually begins with the reference librarian or the local community historian. Still, it also means visiting the barber shop, town hall, police station, tavern, and church.  And it often calls for a visit to the nursing or retirement home.

Along the way, you collect your evidence, and the time will eventually arrive to try to fit the puzzle together by placing material into a pattern, which allows for the creation of a coherent narrative.

For the Greenwood disaster, this is still a work in progress, but as I continue, I will share thoughts on additional resources I come up with along the way.

Click here to read an initial post on the disaster

Materials in the collection of the Greenwood Public Library.
Materials in the collection of the Greenwood disaster in the Public Library.
Greenwood was a railroad junction. A photo without caption in Greenwood A Delaware Town from the Greenwood Public Library.
Greenwood was a railroad junction. A photo without caption in Greenwood A Delaware Town from the Greenwood Public Library.

Bringing Communities Together to Remember Tragedies: Southern Flight 242 in New Hope, Ga & Pan Am Flight 214 in Elkton, MD

This afternoon while driving home from the University of Delaware during a heavy downpour, I listened to Transom, a new public media show. The broadcast, “Southern Flight 242:  Bringing My Father Home” by Will Coley, was the piece that had me attentively listening as the rain came down. In it, an audio documentarian digs deeply into the story of his father’s death in a commercial plane crash in New Hope George on April 4, 1977.

Will was seven when Southern Flight 242 went down, taking 72 lives, including nine residents of New Hope, but 22 passengers walked away from the wreckage.  He was reluctant to search out the narrative for decades, although many people encouraged him to look into the tragedy.  As times made the sad event grow a little more distant, Will stumbled onto a New York Times article describing how surviving passengers and townspeople, who were “brought together by fate and a relentless hailstorm,” came back together in the town of New Hope twenty years after the impact on a Georgia highway.

At the reunion, “eight of the surviving passengers joined more than 100 others whose lives crossed the path of flight 242, including rescue workers, volunteers, doctors, nurses, and relatives of the deceased.  Jack Barker, a retired Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, said he had never heard of a similar reunion,” the newspaper reported.

This tragedy deeply affected many people, and Will lost his father when he was seven years old.  Left with some photos and a few audio tapes to remember him, it took 35 years before he was ready to look more deeply into the occurrence memorialized in New Hope, GA, as the big jet came down in the center of town.

But while he was cleaning out his grandmother’s house after she passed away, he found a cassette tape with a few brief moments of sounds from long ago as his father showed him how to record something.  He had no memory of this as his dad explained audio to the child, a medium he now works in.

With this, he decided to look into the tragedy, as it might help him better understand his father and himself.  The material was put together for the show Transom, and the broadcast essay is now available on public media.

This excellent audio essay reminded me of an experience we had in Cecil County on December 8, 2013, when the community and family members of Flight 214 paused to mark the passage of 50 years since the crash of Pan American World Airways Jet, Flight 214, took 81 lives in a cornfield at the edge of Elkton.  On the day that marked the passage of a half-century, we invited family members, first responders, and community residents to come together to honor the memory of those who lost their lives and to remember a generation of first responders who answered an unimaginable call that changed so many lives in a split-second.

There are some great new public media outlets, such as Transom and Unfictionalized, sharing first-person stories these days.

Click here to hear the full program

HowSound:  The Backstory of Good RadioStorytelling

From the Blog Confessions of an Oral Historian:  “A Forgotten Hero of Southern Airways Fligh5 242:  New Hope Fire Chief John R. Clayton.”