MOUNT VERNON — Late on the Sunday morning of Dec. 22, 1918, Frank Horton and Amos Wymer were walking near the river in downtown Mount Vernon. They stopped at the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge near the viaduct, and waited for a freight train to pass across the bridge.
After the train made its way southwest, the men began to walk across the steel bridge from the north side of the Kokosing. Looking down from the bridge, they made out the form of a man in the water, near the bank.
The man was not moving.
Horton and Wymer rushed back to the end of the bridge and scrambled down the bank to check on the man. He was clearly dead.
They hadn’t heard a splash, but then again, the noise of the train was considerable, and they hadn’t noticed a body in the water before the train’s passing.
The men summoned police who called an ambulance to move the man’s body to a funeral home. A search of the man’s pockets was made, and an identification card was found: John C. Putnam of Indian Head, Clark County, Maryland.
Miller Brothers Funeral Home arranged to contact the man’s family.
That much information was gleaned from a report in the Democratic Banner newspaper, with no immediate follow-up over the next several issues.
I suspect that there was no immediate follow up because the funeral home probably discovered the same thing I did when I researched this name and location: There’s no such person. Indian Head isn’t even in Clark County, Maryland, it’s in Charles County. The ID was fake.
Meanwhile, the coroner’s inquest was held. No one saw the man fall from the train, so it wasn’t evident that there was any foul play involved.
The coroner ruled that the man “probably” suffered a heart attack and fell, though no hard evidence of such was presented. What was clear was that the man drowned.
As news of this mysterious death spread throughout the area and beyond, Col. Pogue Board of Letart, West Virginia, became alarmed. His daughter-in-law, Adie Board, had said that her husband, Pogue’s son Holly Forest Board, was missing.
Holly and Adie lived with their three children in Benton, a crossroads about halfway between Millersburg and Mt. Hope in Holmes County.
Holly worked as a brakeman on the railroad, and had disappeared from a train that went from Orrville, through Mount Vernon, and on to Columbus on Dec. 22. No one on the train could explain Board’s disappearance, and no one had heard from him since.
Colonel Pogue Board and his wife Emma came to Mount Vernon on Jan. 14, 1919. The body had apparently already been buried, for the only thing for the Boards to look at were the clothes of the drowned man.
Mr. and Mrs. Board were uncertain about the pants and shoes, but they said with confidence that they recognized the shirt as being the one Holly was wearing the last time that they saw him.
But they were wrong.
In late February, Holly Forest Board’s body was found in Allen Creek, near Millersburg.
Whether he had suffered an accident, been murdered, or committed suicide, I was unable to determine.
The Democratic Banner carried no follow-up, and I was unable to find any further information about the man who fell from the train.
How could the newspaper have missed such a perplexing story?
The fact is, early 1919 was a chaotic time as the nation was just beginning to see the last of the news of the end of the Great War in Europe, and the first few U.S. soldiers returning home.
At the same time, the area was just beginning to crawl out from the worst of the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic, which had closed Mount Vernon’s schools for three months at the end of 1918.
The newspaper even printed a notice at one point apologizing for lapses in their coverage due to the absences of a large portion of their staff, due to the influenza epidemic. They simply missed it.
so, this mystery remains hanging in midair.
Who was this man? Why did he fake his identity? Did he truly suffer a heart attack and fall from the train? Was he pushed? Did he jump?
How exactly could the crew of this train apparently confuse the deceased with Holly Board of Benton, who was said to be working on this very train, yet shows up dead in a creek near Millersburg?
There is something very odd about all of this. And it slipped through the cracks in 1919. We may never know the solution.