It was a sunny Saturday morning, the end of an especially hot, dry summer.  The drought had been so bad there weren't even any watermelons to be had on Market Square.

Folks downtown were still getting used to the new step-walled Southern terminal, finished a year-and-a-half ago down at the foot of Gay Street, the biggest train station in East Tennessee.  Passengers waiting for the Carolina Special that morning may have pondered the ominous words of Robert Bums, inscribed in marble on the arched fireplace of the eastern waiting room:

Time comes wi' kind oblivious shade
And daily darker sets it;
And if nae mair mistakes are made
The world soon forgets it.

That morning's Knoxville journal was knocking around the lobby, with news about the remarkable St. Louis World's Fair.  Southern was offering special deals on round-trip tickets from Knoxville -- you could ride coach there and back for just $12.80.  It was a 20-hour trip each way.

There was also news of a funeral that afternoon in New Market, of a former Knoxvillian named W. R. King.  One of the passengers waiting for the Carolina Special that day had promised to conduct the services, the Presbyterian minister Isaac Emory.

Piloted by veteran engineer Dick Parrott, the train pulled out promptly at 9:35, the sixth departure that morning alone.  Parrott proceeded east at a conservative 40 m.p.h.  There was another funeral party on board.  Lee Hill had been killed in that awful powder explosion up in Jellico.  Accompanied by his young wife and two small children, his body was on its way home to South Carolina.

Also on board was Knoxville's five-term Republican U.S. Congressman, sometime journalist Henry R. Gibson.

Another train, the number 15 from Bristol, was due back at the terminal at 11.  It didn't arrive.  By lunchtime, word came back of a collision just 20 miles out.  Forty passengers dead, maybe 50, maybe 60, maybe more.  Hundreds flooded the station for news, more than 1,000 by nightfall, reporters for big-city newspapers among them.

Just after dark, a train arrived, but for some reason rolled slowly past the crowd, past the new Southern terminal itself, and on to the Broadway crossing.  There, coffins were lined up in the grass, and undertakers unloaded 32 badly mangled bodies from the baggage car, 15 more from the mail car.  About 20 victims were not yet identified, most of them black.  Loaded into "dead wagons," they were taken up to Gay Street mortuaries for identification.

The coroner discovered that both funeral parties were almost completely wiped out.  The Rev. Emory was killed, as was most of the King funeral party.  The late Lee Hill's wife, his sister, his father, and his two children died.  Protected within its coffin, some remarked bitterly, Lee Hill's body was unscathed.

Newspaper articles told the story of a badly injured, suddenly lonely four-year-old girl.  Reading them 91 years later can still close your throat.

The cause of the disaster is still obscure.  Westbound number 15 was clearly behind schedule, speeding to catch up.  Some said it was doing 70 m.p.h.  But when their locomotives went literally through each other, both engineers died instantly.

Some blame the westbound engineer, who reportedly was trying to get back to town to see the Knoxville horse races.  They weren't able to pry his body out until after they'd unloaded the first carfuls of bodies in Knoxville.  The conductor on the same train survived; rather than see his dead colleague blamed, he accepted full responsibility, then refused to speak more about it.  The conductor and the two dead engineers had been neighbors here, their homes practically right around the corner from each other in what's now the Fourth and Gill neighborhood.

The crash made international headlines.  The known dead totaled 64, though some argue that Italian stowaways brought it to 72.  A good third of the dead were Knoxvillians, though other victims had addresses as distant as New Jersey and Ohio.  A dozen were buried at Old Gray on Broadway.

More than 160 people were admitted to Knoxville General with significant injuries.  Former Confederate surgeon John Mason Boyd was on hand to help.  Rep. Gibson escaped with bruises, one of only two survivors in his car.  Morally shaken by the horror, he soon retired from politics to a career of writing otherworldly poetry.  He moved away from East Tennessee and died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 100.

In the years that followed, popular folk songs told the story of the New Market Train Wreck, both in graphic detail.  One offered instructions for how to produce the sound effects of a double train collision with a household organ.  The New Market wreck then earned a weird distinction -- of all train wrecks remembered in song, the New Market wreck was by far the most deadly.

The other song was popularized by a young Knoxville man named Charlie Oaks.  He was a musician, a singer and guitarist, and he was blind.  Here in our train stations, he sang mournful songs about the New Market wreck.  A few stanzas told the story from the point of view of one who witnessed the arrival of survivors and corpses in Knoxville.

Sometimes he sang a capella, but he also played guitar and harmonica, sometimes at the same time; he'd made this thing of wire that would hold his harmonica in place while he strummed.  He couldn't have been much good for business, singing these gory songs about train wrecks, bleeding corpses, headless bodies, crying children, to Edwardian passengers getting on and off passenger cars, many of whom would soon be speeding over the same tracks Charlie Oaks was singing about.  But maybe because he was blind, maybe because the people seemed to like him, the station master tolerated Charlie Oaks.

Sometimes he sold his song, which someone had printed up for him on little cards known as billets.  Today, country-music historian Charles K. Wolfe, author of Tennessee Strings, remembers the blind man who sang about the New Market train wreck as perhaps the first truly professional country musician.

In the early '20's, some New York music producers tried to record Charlie Oaks.  But his strained, mournful cry was too weird for a mainstream audience.  Oaks lived out his days on the streets of downtown Knoxville, singing for buffalo nickels on the sidewalk.

Probably written by Jack Neely for Metropulse magazine, 9/21/95. Author information has been lost. No copyright infringement intended.