Volume 13 , Issue 14

1906 Train Wreck At Dover, OK

Have you ever heard the story of the train wreck at Dover, Oklahoma? In reading the history the Dover train wreck happened around September, 1906. Does anyone out there have any ancestral stories of the Dover train wreck of 1906?

Dover was like a lot of territorial towns, but for a railroad like the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, it likely would never have existed. The Rock Island, as the railroad was popularly called, crossed the Cimarron River in Kingfisher County, upstream from the territorial capital, Guthrie. Those rail connections were all that was needed to inspire townsite promoters to lay out a little community astride the Rock Island tracks just north of a trestle that rested on the river's sandy bottom to link its sandy banks. This is wherein laid Dover's fate.

In 1898, an early omen came in, but at the time it seemed more of an inconvenience than anything else. Heavy rains shifted the river's bottom, and the trestle collapsed, briefly stranding the town.

Rock Island engineers quickly threw together a temporary, wooden replacement and put it in place -- right around the line's bend as it headed out of Dover southbound to cross the river.

Eight years later, the temporary bridge was still there. So was Dover, and its residents had spent nearly all of the intervening years demanding that the Rock Island replace their bridged with something built to last, something that would be safer because it would rest atop piles driven under the water, through the sand, and deep into bedrock. But . . . nothing happened until 1906.

In that same year around September a rain soaked and fell, transforming the the Cimarron River into a canyon of raging rapids powerful enough to seep away Dover's trestle. It happened in an instant, just as a fully loaded Rock Island passenger train roared around the bend south of town, on its way to . . . death.

Nobody knows just how many died that day, the companies kept no records of who had bought tickets to ride the rails to their doom. The victims probably numbered more than a hundred, though, for bodies were still washing up, twenty or more miles downstream, for several days.   |  View or Add Comments (2 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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