This was posted on the Arkansas web site:

The Duck Hill Wreck

Posted By: Bryan Howerton
Date: Tuesday, 28 January 2003, at 10:39 p.m.

In Response To: Arkansas dead in Mississippi (Stanley King)

It took me awhile to remember where I'd read an account of the Duck Hill train wreck, but here it is, from James Willis' excellent book --

Peter Kirby, conductor of the southbound train on the Mississippi Central Railroad, had pulled his train onto a siding at Duck Hill, eighty miles south of Holly Springs, to wait for the northbound train to pass. Waiting for more than the prescribed length of time, Conductor Kirby ordered his eleven-car train to move out. As the lengthy train was laboring to overcome its considerable inertia, chugging slowly south, within a mile of Duck Hill, Kirby and his unidentified engineer saw it—the twelve-car, northbound train on the same track coming toward them at terrific speed, attempting to make up time. The engineer on Peter Kirby’s train set the brakes and both he and Kirby jumped. Immediately afterwards, below Duck Hill on the Mississippi Central Railroad, there occurred “one of the most terrible wrecks of machinery. . . ever beheld, and furnishing a chronicle of casualties exceeding anything of the kind ever known in the South.” Almost all the casualties—most of whom were soldiers—were on the rapidly moving northbound train. The fatalities on this train numbered thirty-four. Of this figure “four bodies of the whites were not identified, all soldiers; and four Negroes were also killed, one of whom was the fireman on the train.” Of the remaining twenty-six dead, twenty-four were soldiers, and of that number one-half were Arkansans. All of these soldiers, after absences of one kind or another, were returning to their units in camps in northern Mississippi, where they had expected to arrive later than same day. With a single unnamed exception, the dead were buried close to the site where the accident occurred, in a common grave. “Hundreds of people witnessed the sad spectacle of consigning to their last resting place on earth men, who, but a few hours before, were buoyant with health—who had previously faced the enemies of their country on the battlefield without fear, and were again on their way to meet the foe.”

[James Willis, Arkansas Confederates in the Western Theater, pp. 282-3.]

Edward Gerdes Arkansas Civil War Homepage

Messages In This Thread

NEW: Arkansas dead in Mississippi
Stanley King -- Tuesday, 28 January 2003, at 2:28 p.m.
NEW: The Duck Hill Wreck
Bryan Howerton -- Tuesday, 28 January 2003, at 10:39 p.m.
NEW: Re: Arkansas dead in Mississippi
Bryan Howerton -- Tuesday, 28 January 2003, at 5:12 p.m.
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