Two deaths in five weeks on the line near Shamong

A family picking huckleberries on the track

The New Jersey Mirror of July 24, 1867 carried an item headlined "Killed on the Delaware Bay Railroad." According to the paper's account, on July 16, 1867, Mrs. Brewer, wife of Daniel Brewer, was picking huckleberries along the Raritan and Delaware Bay Railroad between Shamong and Woodmansie together with three children and her mother-in-law. As the express train from New York approached, the group moved to leave the track. The paper reported that everyone got clear except Mrs. Brewer, who fell across the rails and could not get up before the train reached her. She was killed instantly. The report said she left a husband and five children.

The account gives no age for Mrs. Brewer, no first name, and no inquest record. The station the two 1867 reports call Shamong is the place later renamed Chatsworth: a 1906 item in the same newspaper, about a woman trying to trace a long-absent brother, identifies his parents' old home at Shamong Station as the place then known as Chatsworth. It is a single newspaper item, and its details — the number of children present versus the number she left behind, the precise point on the line — were not independently checked against any other record.

A bridge gives way under a night freight

Five weeks later, the Mirror of August 21, 1867 reported a second fatal accident on the same railroad. A run of unusually violent showers one Wednesday afternoon — the index record reads that as August 14, 1867, though the newspaper item itself named only the day of the week — had washed the earth away from the track at a bridge over the West Branch near Shamong Station, weakening it. That night a freight train running north struck the bridge, and it gave way, dropping the engine and the first car into the stream below.

The engineer and fireman jumped clear and were not hurt, the paper said. The conductor, William Wells, had apparently climbed onto the engine to speak to the engineer and was killed instantly when the bridge collapsed. The Mirror described him as a young and steady man, well liked by the company's officers and by his fellow employees, and reported that he left a wife and family with nothing provided for them. No inquest, coroner's finding, or burial notice for Wells was located in this search.

The West Branch is not further identified in the index record, and no period map was consulted in this session to match it to a named stream crossing the old Raritan and Delaware Bay right-of-way. The bridge site is therefore not located here.

Reading the two reports together

Nothing in either report says the accidents were connected beyond the railroad and the general vicinity. They are presented together here because both were printed within five weeks of each other, both concern the same short stretch of line between Shamong and Woodmansie, and together they illustrate two very different hazards of the same railroad in its early years: an ordinary roadside task turned fatal by an approaching train, and a structure undermined by weather that gave way under a night freight. Both victims are named in the record — Mrs. Brewer only by her married name, William Wells in full — and neither report supplies more than the newspaper's own account of what happened. The two records were found by separate searches of the index, and neither supplies any detail about the other.