Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

The Great Wallace Shows

 Muggy and oppressively hot, August often suffocates Michigan. Moist air rises above the Great Lakes, blunting the summer sun but trapping its heat like a sauna.

The men of the Great Wallace Shows had worked late into the night on August 5, 1903. They'd put on a show in the town of Charlotte, Michigan, then torn down the big top and loaded the animals and everything onto the circus's two trains. Around dawn, they pulled out, bound for Lapeer: one more small Midwestern town on an itinerary that stretched from the last snows of spring to the first snows of autumn.

Michigan's two major railroads converged in Durand, a pretty little farming town with one of the busiest railway hubs in the Midwest. Grand Trunk built a beautiful Victorian depot at the "Durand Diamond," where the rail lines crossed. As the first Great Wallace train pulled into Durand, it encountered a train full of livestock. The first circus train stopped in plenty of time at the west end of the train yard.

A red light was sent out to signal the second circus train. Although the engineer saw it, his train's air brakes failed. In the face of inescapable collision, he and the fireman — who moments before had been stoking the train's locomotive — leapt from the train.

The second Wallace train plowed into the caboose of the train ahead. Circus employees in the rear sleeper car had no warning. W. L. Cone, steward of the company, was one of the survivors. "When the crash came, the shock turned me over on my stomach. Something began to shove me forward. When the movement finally ceased, one leg was caught, but I was able to pull it loose and walk out over the splinters."

Cone was one of the lucky ones. Seventeen people were killed instantly. Forty-six injured were carried from the wreckage on the mattresses on which they'd been sleeping. Of the injured, six succumbed. Men with the gravest injuries begged to be shot and released from their agony. A special train took the rest to hospitals in Detroit, several hours away.

The second Wallace train had been pulling cars full of animals. The cars closest to the derailed engine were badly damaged. Three camels, an elephant, and a dog reportedly worth $1000 were killed in the crash or had to be put down.

In all, twenty-three people died. With the assistance of "imported" morticians, two local undertakers embalmed most of the human fatalities in G. W. McLain's "undertaking rooms." Despite the summer heat, the bodies lay in state for several days afterward. Hundreds of people, both relatives and sightseers, traveled from across the state to view the corpses. In the end, ten bodies languished unclaimed.

The unknown roustabouts were buried in Lovejoy Cemetery on the outskirts of Durand, Michigan. One of the men was later identified, "taken up," and reburied in New York. Board signs marked the remaining graves.

The train wreck was one of the worst in Michigan history. A collection was taken statewide to build a permanent monument to the mysterious circus men. Although nothing over a dollar was accepted, the fund raised almost $400. A granite obelisk was set to be unveiled on Decoration Day.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Decoration Day was celebrated mostly in the North. Widows tidied up the graves of husbands killed in the Civil War. Gradually, the custom spread so that all families went to the graveyard on the last weekend of May to wash headstones, pull weeds, plant flowers, and picnic among their relatives' monuments. The tradition mutated after World War II into the holiday we know as Memorial Day.

Decoration Day 1904 was quite an occasion in the small farming town of Durand. A notice in the local paper, the Durand Express, summoned all the local teamsters (anyone with a wagon and a team of animals to pull it) to provide transportation in their wagons. The farming community, which worked the land around the country graveyard, was invited to participate. An informal parade formed at the Victorian train depot. The Durand City Band "furnished" music. A male "quartette" sang, three reverends preached, and the assembled crowd sang a rousing chorus of "America the Beautiful."

The story passed into local lore and was more or less forgotten.

*

When I was a kid, we drove past the Lovejoy graveyard all the time. It lay on the way to my great-uncle's farm. I don't know that I ever paid much attention to it. It looked like another simple country graveyard, perched on the dome of a hill too steep to farm.

I probably would never have set foot in it, but twenty-some years ago, my Great-Aunt Hilda — widowed then and living in an apartment in Flint — brought it up. "Do you remember that graveyard in Durand? It has a monument to some circus people killed in a train wreck near there." She smiled as she sipped her tea. "I thought that might interest you."

One afternoon when my brother and I were casting around for something to do, I mentioned the story. Distances don't mean anything in the countryside where I grew up. My parents sometimes drive two hours to Detroit for dinner. My high school friends still drive an hour to go to a movie in Ann Arbor. My brother Allen had nothing better to do, he said, than to drive me out into the sticks to look at graves.

We combed the whole hill, searching for the circus monument. I expected something entertaining: an oddly shaped stone with clown faces engraved on it, maybe brightly painted like the Showfolks of America memorial in Colma, California.

Allen and I found all sorts of other things. Tucked in the green grass were a pair of small white plastic planters in the form of lambs. We came across a couple of large bent-wire plant hangers in the shape of hearts. A cement garden gnome in a bright red coat guarded one grave.

The older graves lay on the crest of the hill. A stained marble slab commemorated Harvey Hale, who had served in the Michigan Infantry during the Civil War. Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that my home state had a history before the auto industry began in the 1900s.

A square pillar was draped with a sculptured shawl decorated with tassels and fringe. The detail was very fine for a monument in a country graveyard.

A wonderful old grave had a bas-relief of two crossed branches. One sported large oak leaves. The oak used to be looked upon as the tree from which Christ's cross was made. The other branch was a laurel or maybe olive.

Another grave had a broken stone, each side sinking into the rich green sod. The top half displayed a complicated weeping willow, dwarfed by an open "book of life." That was a silent commentary that I could still interpret a century after it was carved.

Unfortunately, I knew my photos of the place would never do justice to the artwork. The sun was sinking over the farmland, throwing rich golden light on the pines fencing the cemetery. They cast the stones deep into shadow.

Eventually Allen and I worked our way around to the cemetery sign. It reported that the cemetery had been "donated by the Hegedus Family in June 1989." I wondered if they had merely lent or rented the land to the township before that, if there had been some clause that they might someday evict everyone when they wanted their land back. Maybe they were holding out, hoping Durand would someday be grand again and would pay for the cemetery land.

We wore ourselves out slogging up and down the steep hillside. We never found the circus monument.

*

My mom couldn't believe we'd spent over an hour in the tiny graveyard and didn't locate what we'd gone to see. After I returned to San Francisco, she made an excursion to Durand.

Maybe because she was there earlier in day (yeah, that's my excuse, okay?), she found the memorial to the unknown roustabouts. It wasn't anything special to look at, she warned. The epitaph said, "In Memory of the Unknown Dead Who Lost Their Lives in the Railroad Wreck of the Great Wallace Shows." It gave no hint they'd worked in a circus.

She sent me a link to the Michigan Railroad History Museum, which is housed in Durand's Union Station. It had photographs of a derailed car and a dead camel.

When I went home the next August, Mom and I traveled out to see the elusive granite marker. We reached the graveyard late in the day. It was one of those Michigan summer days that Mom calls a "beastly hot," when the air lay thick and heavy, close to the earth. As soon as we stepped out of her air-conditioned Buick, every mosquito in the county scented a banquet.

Surrounded by the whine of hungry insects, I snapped a quick, artless photo and dodged quickly back into the car. I was disappointed the monument was so prosaic, but satisfied to have finally hunted it down.

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"The Great Wallace Shows" appeared originally on Gothic.Net in April 2001.