A Mass Grave Holds These Circus Performers. They’re Buried Together for a Tragic Reason
Showmen’s Rest is a mass burial of clowns, trapeze artists, and other circus performers. The wandering families of entertainers were members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. They worked together, lived together, and sadly in 1918, they perished together in one of the worst train wrecks in history.
At 4 a.m. on June 22, 1918, the train carrying performers and support crew for the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus stopped just outside the town of Hammond, Indiana to cool an overheated axle box. The passengers were sound asleep as the flagman set out down the tracks on foot to lay out flares at an appropriate distance to warn oncoming trains.
They Slept Soundly As Another Train Headed Their Way
Michigan Central Railroad engineer Alonzo Sargent had fallen asleep in the 21-car military train traveling at 35 miles per hour. He didn’t see the two yellow and two red signals or the flares as his train came blazing down the tracks towards the wooden circus cars. The flagman tried desperately to get his attention, but couldn’t.
The Flagman Watched Helplessly As The Train Quickly Approached
Sargent slept through the flagman throwing a flare directly at his train’s windshield in a last-ditch attempt to get his attention. It was too late to stop at that point, and the metal locomotive plowed through the wooden cars on the track, killing most of the passengers towards the back of the train within the first 30 seconds of impact.