The train that jumped the tracks in Jellico Tennessee, forever altered my family.
On July 6, 1944, a troop train transporting 1000 freshly minted soldiers, left Indianapolis bound for the Carolinas. From there they would be sent to the European theater of WW2.
At sunset, a 16-year-old teen watching the train pass his small town of Jellico, Tennessee watched as the troop train jumped the tracks and plunged into a 50-foot gorge of the Clear River.
Growing up in California, I had heard this story, so distant in years and location. Two decades ago, our family relocated from California to Indiana. For several years, I made regular trips to South Carolina. Signs for big and small towns along the route punctuated the long hours in the car. In the mountains of Tennessee, there is a single exit for Jellico.
The unusual name caught my attention each time, but I didn’t stop until my mom mentioned that Jellico was the place where the largest troop train wreck in the United States had occurred. The place where my grandfather had died.
Beginnings
From the small Midwest town of Waynesburg, Ohio, Ray William Parker joined the army to fight in World War II. After graduating boot camp, Parker received a rare opportunity to return home for a few days. Saying good-bye to his young family, his wife suggested a photo in his uniform. On their porch, he held his young daughter and son while his pregnant wife snapped the picture. It would be their last photo of him. He kissed his wife, his son, and the pretty little brunette girl who would later be my mother.
Reporting to Indianapolis, Parker and hundreds of new recruits, boarded the Louisville & Nashville Railroad that would transport the troops south. My grandfather was in one of the front cars as the train chugged out of the station.
Hours later
Mere hours later, in Campbell County, Tennessee, the engine, tender, and four passenger cars jumped the tracks, careened over the side of the Jellico Narrows deep ravine and plummeted into the rushing river, crashing into a massive boulder. Twelve died instantly. Many more died in the following days.
One report said, “Hundreds of Campbell County residents flocked to the scene to help. They made the first rescues using block and tackle slings to hoist the wounded up the side of the gorge to the road. It often took up to ten men to hoist a body up to the road. Some brought welding torches to free the trapped soldiers.
A trucker who was passing through stopped to take a load of injured soldiers to the hospital. He came back and took several more loads. Volunteers continued to comb the river for dead and wounded.
Later in the night, doctors from nearby towns Corbin, Lafollette, Middlesboro, and Williamsburg joined Jellico’s only doctor to treat the wounded. They went from car to car giving morphine injections to the trapped men. One soldier received plasma transfusions. Faces bleeding and dirty, many soldiers waited for their more seriously injured comrades to be taken away before receiving care for themselves.
The ambulances joined the rescue effort two hours after the train derailed. They waited at the road for the injured and took them to hospitals in five nearby towns.
Morning light
Early the next morning, an Army major arrived to take over leading the rescue effort. But the county’s work was just beginning. Most of the injured had been rescued by midnight, but there were still dead to be recovered and wounded to look after.
More organized efforts were initiated. Boy Scouts went door to door collecting shoes, clothes, and sheets for the soldiers. Red Cross units served food on the Jellico hospital’s lawn. A local restaurant closed in order to assist in preparing food. Assembly lines were established, sandwiches made, and local volunteers transported the food to the rescue site. Local groceries were emptied of bread.
Some help was not as organized. Many residents took in soldiers for the night, giving them food, a place to bathe, and a place to sleep.
The volunteers who had worked all night carrying men out of the gorge eventually built a makeshift dam to lower the water level to retrieve bodies. They continued to work through the next three days.
In all, 34 men died in the wreck and 75 were injured. Some survivors went on to fight in North Africa.
My grandfather
In critical condition, my grandfather was taken to the Secret City in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He lingered for four days, long enough for his wife to travel to his bedside and hold him when he died.
The people of the tiny town of Jellico are the keepers of the flame. The welcome mat is out for those who come to remember, to grieve, and to try to understand. At the place in Clear River where the locomotive came to rest is a plaque. In the town square is a memorial with the names of the soldiers who perished in the crash. Adjacent to the hardware store, a home-made museum houses accounts, news, photos, and memorabilia about the train, the wreck, and the important people whose lives were changed on that fateful day when the train jumped the tracks.
My first visit to Jellico was like a pilgrimage. As I studied the photos and newspaper stories, the elderly gentleman who runs the hardware store approached. “Do you know someone who was on the train?”
“My grandfather.”
He nodded his understanding.
I indicated the wall of photos and newspaper stories. “How often do people come to your museum?”
“Every week.” He hitched the strap on his overalls. “People come who were on the train. Their families come. They have questions.”
Keepers of the flame
Within minutes, the town’s librarian joined us as well as a photographer from the newspaper who took my photo. The librarian provided a packet of information, and a history DVD. He introduced me to his mother, now a great-grandmother, whose husband had been the teen who roused the town to rescue the injured and house the survivors. The bell from the 418 engine is preserved on their property.
The lives of the people of Jellico are forever altered because of the horrific event and their empathetic and immediate response. Their hearts are forever knit with the soldiers, and the families of the soldiers, who were aboard the train.
Some of their stories are hard. The man who drove the school bus, ferrying wounded soldiers to the hospital, cannot forget the terrible screams of the injured. Some of their stories are heroic. A welder who had future plans that required keen eyesight, knew the effects that extended time torching men from the wreckage would have on his vision. Without hesitation, he set side his future and dedicated his skills to help.
Some stories are winsome. To the family who housed and fed him until the military made arrangements for his continued journey to the war, one soldier wrote every year. Another soldier returned after the war to marry the nurse he met in the Jellico hospital.
Born April 27, 1921, my grandfather, Ray William “Billy” Parker was 23 years old when he died. He is buried in Sandy Valley Cemetery in Ohio. His early death on July 11, 1944, abruptly changed the dynamic of our family and left a tragic void from which we never recovered. The community where he grew up remembers him as a compassionate and caring man who lived and loved well.
For You
The Girl Who Wore Freedom. Dany Patrix was five years old when American soldiers liberated her French village on D-Day. Those American troops were fellow soldiers who served with my grandfather, Ray William Parker, who died when the troop train he was riding jumped the tracks in Jellico, Tennessee.
Chasing Sunrise. When deadly internationals and the black market blow onto his tropical island home at the same time Hurricane Hugo unleashes its fury, are Michael’s skills enough to protect those he cares about? Chasing Sunrise was nominated for a Christy Award.
The Patent. When the world teeters on the verge of World War III, the nation that develops a patent attorney’s invention will be invincible in the race for global dominance.
PeggySue Wells is the bestselling author of 45 books including Chasing Sunrise and The Girl Who Wore Freedom. Aboard the train that jumped the tracks, Ray William Parker is her maternal grandfather.
