The crossing flagman struck by the thing he was flagging

A shift change at the crossing

The New Jersey Mirror of June 28, 1922 reported, under the headline "Flagman Critically Injured by Automobile," that a man identified only as "Matty" Burns had for a number of years worked as flagman at the railroad crossing by the South Pemberton station, just south of Pemberton on the western edge of the Pine Barrens. According to the paper's account, Burns arrived on a Saturday to relieve Gertrude Dean, whose shift was ending, just as a train was approaching in the distance. The index record gives only the day of the week; the Saturday before the June 28 issue was June 24, 1922, but the paper is not quoted as printing that date.

In his hurry to take the warning standard from Dean and flag any oncoming automobiles at the crossing, the report said, Burns stepped into the road without noticing a car driven by a man identified as Captain Shoe, of Camp Dix, coming toward him. Burns was knocked down, and the car's wheels passed over his head and neck.

An account that spreads no blame

The Mirror's summary is notably careful to say that the driver was not at fault. It reported that Shoe was driving slowly at the time, that he swerved into a shallow roadside ditch in an attempt to avoid Burns, and that a witness, A. F. Michell of Mount Holly, along with other bystanders, stated afterward that the driver bore no responsibility for the accident. That judgement is the newspaper's and the bystanders', not this entry's; the same report, in describing Burns as stepping into the car's path, quietly places the fault on the injured man, which was a routine habit of period accident reporting.

Burns, still unconscious, was carried in Shoe's car to the base hospital at Camp Dix. The paper reported that it was stated at the hospital that, though seriously injured, he would probably recover — unless head injuries not yet apparent turned out to have been inflicted. No later notice confirming Burns's recovery, or reporting his death, was located in this search, so his ultimate fate is not established here.

A crossing worker undone by the automobile he was meant to warn

The irony the Mirror's headline points at is plain: a flagman whose job was to protect automobile traffic from an oncoming train was instead struck down by one of the automobiles he was there to warn. Camp Dix, the Army post referenced as the driver's post of assignment, sat only a few miles away, and by 1922 its traffic — along with the wider growth of automobile travel on roads that had once served only wagons and stagecoaches — was becoming as routine a hazard at Pine Barrens rail crossings as the trains themselves.