Gilberts: The disaster staycation tour a suggested day trip in area |
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Gilberts: The disaster staycation tour a suggested day trip in area
On Easter Monday, Jim suggested that we take a drive and his suggested destination was a place we have been to a few times before.
On Easter Monday Jim suggested that we take a drive and his suggested destination was a place we have been to a few times before. It is located in Elgin County; just off Highway 401 (in fact you can see it from the 401). It is the site of a terrible plane crash in 1941, just east of Lawrence Station. That got me thinking: With gas prices being what they are and folks being squeezed by higher prices everywhere, maybe some people would like some ideas for a trip closer to home. Here is our disaster staycation tour.
We’ll start with the 1941 plane crash east of Lawrence Station in Elgin County. It was the early days of commercial aviation and American Airlines Flight 1 was on the third leg of a trip from New York to Chicago going from Buffalo to Detroit. On board were 17 passengers, mainly business executives, all of them American, and one flight attendant. Captain David Cooper, a 10-year veteran of the airline, was joined by co-pilot Richard Owens, on his first DC3 flight.
Gilberts: The disaster staycation tour a suggested day trip in area Back to video
What caused the plane to go down on Oct. 30, 1941 around 10 p.m. was never ascertained but everyone on board was killed. Residents in the area saw the plane take a series of tortuous climbs and turns and then plunge to the ground and burst into flames.
There was a book by Robert D. Schweyer published a few years ago called Final Descent: The Loss of the Flagship Erie, and we suspect it was because of this book that a plaque appeared at the site.
To get there, take Highway 401 to exit No. 157, for Iona and Melbourne. Head north, toward Melbourne and take the first road on the right, Third Line, which will take you through Lawrence Station and then, the field is on the left. The plaque is located just before that field.
Closer to home is one of our Chatham-Kent Heritage Network plaques marking the place where, on Oct. 27, 1854, a Great Western train coming from Niagara Falls and carrying mainly immigrants, headed toward Detroit, and eventually places west, collided with a fully-loaded gravel train, which was out on the track shoring up the banks.
This happened just east of Jeannette’s Creek and has been called the Baptiste Creek train disaster. Even though it happened 171 years ago, it is still listed among the Top 10 of Canada’s worst train accidents in terms of lives lost. Fifty-seven people died and 47 more were horribly injured, many losing limbs.
As in the Flagship Erie crash, this was the early days for train travel. The tracks in the vicinity were not even complete.
The town of Chatham wasn’t exemplary at its handling of the victims either. It certainly wasn’t Chatham’s finest hour. To read more about this, go to Volume 9: Kent Historical Society Papers and Addresses, to an article written by Robert Mitchell.
To get to the site, go west on Riverview Line, which becomes Tecumseh Line and look for the plaque on the left, just off Poppe Road, two kilometres before you get to Jeannette’s Creek.
The Gilberts are award-winning historians with a passion for telling the stories of Chatham-Kent’s fascinating past
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