GAMBIER — It should have been harmless.
What would normally be an incredibly dangerous stunt should have been nothing more than a trick to intensify the initiation of a freshman into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Kenyon College.
After all, the boy’s father had come to town and was not alarmed at the hazing. He had been through an initiation himself years earlier. The evening of Oct. 28, 1905, he sat with other fraternity brothers present and past in the fraternity’s Greek-style headquarters. It must have been a festive evening.
So festive that, apparently, they did not hear the train whistle.
Stewart Lathrop Pierson did.
The 18-year-old student had been put through his paces throughout pledge week. The small campus saw numerous stunts that week, from students walking down Middle Path on their knees to pushing peanuts across the yard in front of Old Kenyon with their noses. It’s probably a safe bet, too, that a prodigious amount of partying was taking place, too, with the young men getting very little sleep.
After the tragic accident, that was the official line that the college took for far too many years, that the boy had fallen asleep on the railroad trestle because he hadn’t slept in a couple days, and they had the legal firepower at their disposal to make it stick.
Only a small-town historian looking into the case over a century later proved what really happened, and he’s proud to retell the story this month in his long-running column, History Knox.
Even at this late date, it might ruffle a few feathers.
Stewart Lathrop Pierson was a son of the prominent Cincinnati family led by Newbold Pierson, who himself had graduated from Kenyon College in the 1870s. While there, Newbold had been initiated into the distinguished Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, better known as the “Dekes.”
The honor and connections this had given him had helped his successful business career. Thus, he was excited that his son Stu would have the opportunity to join the fraternity as a legacy pledge.
Newbold had inherited his work as a lumber magnate from his father, Daniel Pierson, but he grew it to the point that he remained as overseer while also dealing in real estate and serving as personal secretary to the mayor of Cincinnati.
The Piersons trace back to Yorkshire, England, while Newbold’s mother was Lydia Lathrop. He preserved her family name by giving it as a middle name to his son Stuart, born in 1887. His first name appears to have been a tribute to the boy’s mother’s maternal line, which had the Scottish surname Stewart.
Stu’s mother, Margaret, was a Smedley. Stewart was the middle child of three sons.
When we talk about Kenyon College, it is important to remember that the institution was much smaller in 1905 than it is today. During the schoolyear today, Gambier’s population increases 10-fold when the students arrive. In 1905, the total number of scholars was only a few hundred.
Stu would have been in the process of getting to know his future fraternity brothers, who included seniors Fred Tschan and Alfred Taylor (both were involved with the college choir), Andy York, Herb Brown, and Guy Conover.
His fellow freshman Roland Aves also pops up in these discussions, as he was pledging, too. Joining Newbold Pierson was fellow alumnus Charles Colville. The pair had graduated in 1880.
As pledge week, also known as “hell week” because of the hazing stunts pledges were put through, drew to its close, the Dekes had devised a grand plan to scare the dickens out of young Stu.
As a resident of the Old Kenyon dormitory, Stu would have been familiar with the regular sound of trains passing on the Cleveland, Akron, & Columbus Railway (C.A.&C.) tracks, which ran at the bottom of College Hill behind the dormitory on their way to Mount Vernon. Passing trains were a regular occurrence.
The boy was informed that he would be stationed on the trestle where the tracks crossed the Kokosing River, where the fraternity brothers would eventually fetch him for the final initiation ceremony, late on the evening of Saturday, Oct. 28, 1905.
There’s no question that Stu would have been tired. He’d had to stay up until 2 a.m. to fetch his father, who arrived on a train from Cincinnati early that morning in Mount Vernon. Thus, the official story that the college stuck to for many years was that Stuart Pierson fell asleep waiting on the railroad trestle.
It wasn’t true, but we’ll come back to that later.
What is unquestionably true is that Stu’s presence on the trestle should not have been a problem.
What the fraternity brothers knew — and what the novice freshman would not yet have realized — was that the C.A.&C. railroad did not run any trains through the area on Saturday evenings.
Freight trains rolled throughout the week, and passenger trains came through during the day on weekends, but that particular evening, there should not have been a train on that track.
Except that there was.
Having the line free that Saturday evening, mechanics in the C.A.&C. roundhouse in Mount Vernon either contacted their office in Millersburg and said that it would be a good time to send up engines for maintenance. Engineer Jeff Vanatta and fireman Gus Brokowski fired up the No. 26 locomotive and attached a caboose to it.
They headed out of Millersburg around sunset. By the time they were coming to the curve that led the tracks by Gambier and across the Kokosing, Vanatta later estimated they were cruising along at about 50 miles an hour. The time was 9:41 p.m.
No trouble was noticed along the way, and the engine slowed for its approach to the Mount Vernon roundhouse, on the north bank of the river, before the bridge.
Vanatta eased the locomotive to its designated stopping place. Brokowski hopped down and walked alongside the steam engine. Something caught his eye.
Bending down to take a closer look, Brokowski saw a piece of fabric going up into the locomotive’s ash bin. He reached in and pulled on the fabric, which kept coming out, until the startled worker realized he was holding the remains of a jacket in his hands. One can only imagine he wanted to believe it was a garment that had been left on the tracks and accidentally sucked up into the engine.
The blood suggested otherwise.
NEXT WEEK: Chaos erupts on the Kenyon College campus as the disaster is revealed. Officials swing into motion to deal with the situation and only contact the county authorities as an afterthought.
