A.L. Streeter wasn’t a diabolical man. All he wanted to do was make trains crash.
His bizarre scheme to allow two locomotives to collide July 20, 1895, created a commotion in Stark County and led to a national craze of spectacular wrecks.
When the smoke cleared, Streeter hoped to make a tidy profit from the destruction, proving once again that some folks sure have a strange idea of entertainment.
Streeter, a railroad equipment salesman from Illinois and former conductor for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, promised nothing more than the “most wonderful exhibition ever witnessed in any country” when he organized the crash about 2 miles southeast of Canton.
“Two monster locomotives, with full head of steam, starting a mile apart, will rush toward each other at the rate of 60 or 70 miles an hour, and allowed to come together with a crash that will result in the most horrible HEAD-ON COLLISION ever seen or heard of,” Streeter advertised in the Akron Beacon and Republican and other Northeast Ohio newspapers.
“It will enable those present to note the terrible effects of a railroad horror. It will take place in an enclosure, and the public will be free from all danger. Everybody should see this exhibition.”
Streeter had proposed staging a collision in his home state, but the railways there weren’t interested. In Ohio, however, the financially strapped Cleveland, Canton & Southern Railroad was willing to give the idea a chance.
Mechanics worked to put two rusting locomotives back into working order for the event on the railroad’s Waynesburg branch. The engines were painted red, white and blue in the Conotton roundhouse and emblazoned with the names “Protection” and “Free Trade,” two competing economic theories of the late 19th century.
Each engine pulled two festively decorated flat cars loaded with rocks. The weight was estimated at 40 tons.
Hoping for a crowd of 20,000, Streeter announced a price of 75 cents (about $25 today) to witness the collision at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 20. A high fence was built around the staging area along rural tracks so that paying customers could watch the mayhem from a safe distance.
On the day of the crash, Cleveland, Canton & Southern Railroad trains arrived every 15 minutes, dropping off spectators who paid 15-cent fares. Thousands of people arrived that afternoon and milled about the grounds. Unfortunately for Streeter, only about 200 paid at the gate. Many people chose instead to venture into nearby woods to climb trees for free vantage points.
“Protection” and “Free Trade” waited on the tracks. The daring plan was to have the engineers back up the locomotives a mile, open the throttles and hurtle forward toward disaster. The crews were to leap to safety before the collision.
Too bad no one got to see it. The crash was derailed at the last minute.
According to Streeter, the crowd bypassed the fence and stood too close to the projected point of impact. No amount of coaxing could get the spectators to budge, so Streeter canceled the event for safety’s sake.
According to railroad officials, however, the organizer hadn’t delivered a $2,400 fee for permission to wreck the engines. He had counted on a bigger-paying audience and didn’t have enough money to reimburse the company.
Whatever the reason for the cancellation, spectators were irate. They had been promised the most wonderful exhibition ever witnessed! Angry people climbed down from trees. Some paying customers got their money back at the gate, but others lost out. No one was compensated for the 15-cent fare to get there.
“The affair was a grand humbug from beginning to end,” the Stark County Democrat newspaper pronounced.
“Streeter had no right to arrange for such an affair in such a way. A number of people came from the country, having traveled many miles bringing their families. Of course they were sore and mad and had a right to be. When a man gets up such an exhibition, he ought to have funds enough at hand to carry the thing through, whether there are 10 or 10,000 people there.”
The organizer estimated that he lost $800 of his own money on the venture. So, technically, it really was a disaster — on his wallet. That didn’t thwart him from trying it again. The scheme was sound, he reasoned, but he had picked the wrong time and place. Although Stark County missed out, the collision craze really picked up steam from there.
On Memorial Day 1896, a crowd of about 25,000 gathered at Buckeye Park about 25 miles southeast of Columbus. Two locomotives, each pulling three coal cars and a caboose, raced down the tracks. One engine was named “A.L. Streeter” and the other was “W.H. Fisher,” an official with the Columbus, Hocking & Toledo Railroad.
Debris flew in all directions as the speeding trains collided with a heavy crunch.
According to an account by Clarence Metters in National Magazine: “Twenty-five thousand pairs of eyes were riveted upon one engine or the other as they rushed together, and so critical was the moment that scarcely a word was spoken. On and on sped the two iron monsters at the rate of over 40 miles an hour, and when the crash came it was terrific, both trains being practically destroyed.”
Streeter had improved on his original idea, placing lifelike dummies in the locomotives so that it looked like the crews were in peril.
“They were dressed in the regulation engineman’s garb, and more than one woman covered her eyes, dreading to see the monsters come together, feeling that the trainmen had failed to get off in time, and that they were being carried to a certain and swift destruction,” Metters wrote.
The collision was a smashing success and became the talk of the rail world. Streeter was recruited to organize similar crashes across the country. Other promoters simply took his idea and ran with it.
About 40,000 people gathered for a train collision Sept. 15, 1896, in McLennan County, Texas. Upon impact, the engine boilers exploded, showering the crowd with jagged projectiles, killing three people and injuring dozens.
Despite such calamities, the national craze of staging train crashes continued for another two decades, particularly at state fairs.
In the early 20th century, A.L. Streeter retired from the entertainment business and turned his attention to inventing gadgets for the railroad industry. One of his patents was for an improved brake, which was rather ironic, given his previous inclinations for going full throttle.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.