The February 27, 1917 Wreck

Photograph not reproduced here. The image that goes with this story is held by huntingdoncountyhistory.com and its credit does not permit republication, so it is cited rather than copied. See the original.

Checked against the record. THE SAME THREE ERRORS AS THE SISTER PAGE, which had been corrected while this one was left alone. A correction that reaches one page and not the other is not a correction, and this site now has a check that greps every refuted claim across every page. WRONG, now fixed: “a coal freight”. Every contemporary account calls it a fast PREFERENCE freight. The coal belongs to a victim rather than to the train — Chester A. Minds was a coal operator in the Clearfield region. NUMBER CHANGED to the one a source actually gives: the page said “Seven of them were members of a single family”. The Evening Public Ledger says Minds “and six members of his family” died. The Harrisburg Telegraph's list of identified dead in that party runs to nine. The sources do not agree on a count, so the page now quotes the one that names its own figure and attributes it. CUT for want of a source: “photographers sold real-photo postcards of the wreck across the state.” Real-photo wreck postcards were an ordinary trade in 1917, but nothing opened here says it happened for this wreck, and “across the state” is a scope claim needing its own source. No source was found, which is not the same as finding it untrue.