Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Just about any time things get a little slow, writing-wise, I can count on the Clinton County Times. The Times loved running interesting, and sometimes bizarre, stories that no other newspaper would touch. If I’m short for ideas, I can just look over the Clinton County Times from the early 1900s, and come back with a collection of them.

“Snatched From Death,” is the headline on one of these, and it ran on the front page on February 13, 1903.

The incident happened along Bellefonte Avenue on Monday, February 9, at about six PM. It was a busy evening, with people from the silk mill and other local locations walking along the avenue. One of these people was William Porter, a local man who’d been born on April 8, 1839, just a couple of months before Clinton County was founded. He was sixty-four at the time, and suffering from rheumatism and loss of sight and hearing.

In spite of all this, he was part of the crowd that evening at rush hour, waiting along Bellefonte Avenue for a long train to pass by. Based on what I can see in the article, Porter was basically depending on the rest of the crowd to help shuffle him along.

The train passed, and the crowd moved forward. At the time, the guard gates were manually operated by a railroad employee in a booth, instead of automatically like they are today. The employee had gone home, however, apparently getting off work before the silk mill guys. It was procedure in those days to just leave the gate up and let people fend for themselves after hours.

The crowd got across, but Porter fell and landed on the tracks. And then a freight car broke free from the rest of the train, with the sort of excellent timing these disasters are known for. It rolled back, heading straight for Porter, who had no idea it was coming.

A few of the stragglers, still crossing the tracks, leaped out of the way. Some of the crowd turned away, unable to watch what was about to happen.

“As he got on the track he fell,” noted the Clinton County Times, ”And was unable to get upon his feet before the train was upon him.”

It could have ended in a horrible tragedy, but if it had, I wouldn’t be sitting here a hundred and twenty one years later, writing about it with this lighthearted tone. Two railroad employees, who apparently were either just hanging around or scheduled to work later than the gate guy, took action and grabbed Porter, pulling him out of the way.

“Just in a second of time the railroaders took hold of him and lifted him bodily to a place of safety,” said the Times. “The escape from a terrible death was very narrow.”

The freight car rolled past without any injury to anyone, luckily.

Porter wound up with a few bruises, due to the grabbing and lifting, as the employees hadn’t had time to handle him gently, but I think we can all agree it was better than the other option. The Clinton County Times sort of editorialized about the wisdom of leaving the gates unsupervised: “It is a mot dangerous hour to leave such a public place unprotected for Bellefonte Avenue at quitting time is one of the busiest places in the city.”

As it was, the men bought Porter another sixteen years of life. Porter is buried in the Jersey Shore Cemetery. He died some years after the incident, on April 11, 1919, just past his eightieth birthday. It’s reasonable to assume that this time, trains were not involved.