WARNING: Please be advised that some of the descriptions contained herein are quite graphic, detailing the morbid aftermath of the worst passenger train wreck in US history.

At approximately 7:20 a.m, the two 80-ton locomotives collided head on! The wooden passenger cars splintered, as the cars toward the rear of each train, slammed into and through the wooden passenger cars near the front. The noise from the collision was heard for two miles around. There in a cornfield at Dutchman’s Curve lay carnage the likes to which the civilized mind was not accustomed! Some of the wooden passenger cars were obliterated and trapped victims could be heard moaning in pain, screaming and pleading for help. Body parts lay everywhere, torn from once living humans or in some cases, barely living humans.

Robert Scott sat for a moment, stunned, he had been thrown across the passenger car. He looked around to see blood almost everywhere in the passenger car. Across from him, had been a lady with her child. The impact tore her arm from its socket and drove the arm through the child. Both were dead! He somehow got out of the wreckage and wandered past the horrible scene outside and he continued to wander, aimlessly around Nashville. On Friday, three days later, the eighteen-year-old was found wandering the streets of Nashville, incoherent and still wearing the same bloodstained clothes he had worn on Tuesday. He never could account for the three days following the horrific disaster. His mind had simply shut it out! For the remainder of his life, he would experience nightmares of the collision and a lingering guilt, wondering why he had survived when a lady and her little child had died only a few feet away from him.

Following the collision, Brakeman Robert Corbitt was taken to the morgue. As the embalming process was about to begin, he moved! He was still alive! Immediately he was moved to the hospital, which was flooded with victims. At one point, there was discussion of removing one of his legs. Instead, they attempted to repair the badly damaged leg. The job was such a success that he would recover and walk normally in time, without a limp. A steel plate was also put in his head where he'd received a serious injury. He continued to work for the railroad for the remainder of his working life. As an added note, in 1951, Robert Corbitt again, escaped serious injury or death by jumping from a train just before another disaster!

Mr. William Ferris died in Train Number 4. The young man who had given up his seat to Mr. Ferris survived.

Milton Frank survived because there was no empty seat in the forward cars, forcing him to take a seat near the rear of the train!

S.P. Dannell may have been the only survivor from the smoker car.

Leland Moore survived because he postponed his trip to the smoker to hear the outcome of his friend's joke. Almost everyone in the smoker car of Train Number 4 died!

The jewelry salesman survived the collision, but he was very concerned about his trunk, which contained jewelry valued at approximately $30,000.

The old Confederate soldier, Josiah L. Shaffer and his son-in-law William Knoch, were killed.

Both engineers died. Mr. Kennedy was found with a folded train schedule beneath his body. Mr. William Floyd would have retired after this run. The following day he would have been living his dream.

J.P. Eubanks, the conductor of Train Number 4 survived the train wreck. Following an investigation conducted on July 13, 1918, he was terminated after thirty years of service to the railroad.

Before the day was over, it is estimated that up to 50,000 people came into the cornfield to offer assistance or just to see the wreck. The official death count was 101 people dead with 175 injured, making this the worst railroad accident in US history.

The people of West Nashville and Nashville immediately headed to the scene. The women of the area were especially helpful in administering to the needs of the injured. Some drove their family's car to the scene to haul the injured to the hospital, while others organized their efforts toward bandaging the injured and identifying the dead as well as they could before transporting them to hospitals or morgues. The morbid task of identification was made impossible in many cases due to the fact that so many of the passengers were in parts or crushed far beyond recognition! Nashville's newly founded chapter of the Red Cross quickly mobilized for their first local disaster.

The railroad responded quickly, sending medical crews and repair crews to the scene.

Law enforcement officers arrived and throughout the day conducted traffic and crowd control in the cornfield. Throughout the entire day, with tens of thousands of people milling around and personal belongings and baggage strewn everywhere, nothing was reported stolen from the field. The jeweler's sample trunk lay there also, with its entire $30,000 inventory still inside!

A few of the illegal bootleggers and moonshiners of the area sent whiskey to help the trapped victims deal with the pain while being extracted from the wreckage. For a change, law enforcement simply turned its head and looked the other way. Local butchers and meat cutters volunteered, since they were more accustomed to dealing with the bone and flesh conditions that existed in the cornfield that day. Occasionally, a rescuer would have to take a moment's leave - to vomit!

The people of the Nashville area worked hard that day and seemed to have no intentions of quitting until the last person was out of the tangled wreckage. Amid the bloodcurdling screams of the injured, they kept working, pulling out one, then another until late in the afternoon, when the screams stopped, leaving them the time to finally sit down and try to understand what they'd just been through.

At a few minutes past 10 pm, the eery whistle of a steam locomotive broke the quietness of the cornfield. It was the newly assigned Train Number 1, making its way toward Memphis, past the debris left from the accident and past the few rescuers and sightseers lingering on this hallowed ground.

The story occupied front page headlines only for a few days. The United States Railroad Administration feared the story would destroy the public’s trust in the government’s control of railroads, so they ordered the news stories stopped!

On June 28, 2008, at a ceremony in Galesburg Illinois, the National Railroad Hall of Fame inducted all the 1918 citizens of Nashville and the community of West Nashville, citing their heroic and unselfish actions at Dutchman's Curve on July 9, 1918.