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Looking Back -1917

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Trolley Beheads Woman

by James Rada, Jr.

The Hagerstown and Frederick Railway trolley car ran north along the Thurmont line out of Frederick on the morning of October 16, 1917. The car left Frederick City heading to Montevue and Yellow Springs and onto a crossing at Charlesville. When it reached Thurmont, it would head back on its U-shaped route to Shady Grove on the MD/PA line.

“When the car was hardly half its length away, Mrs. Wastler sprang from the bushes by flinging herself straight out from her position, and placing her head on the rail,” the Catoctin Clarion reported.

Motorman Luther Horine braked the passenger car, but he wasn’t quick enough. He wasn’t supposed to be.

The trolley ran over the woman.

Once it finally rolled to a stop, Horine and Conductor Albert Kefauver jumped to the ground to try and help the woman. It was quickly obvious that she was dead. The trolley had beheaded her. “The upper part of the skull, minus the hair, was found a short distance from the body. A large portion of the brains was found at another spot,” the Clarion reported.

Someone notified Sheriff William C. Roderick and the coroner.

Traffic on the Thurmont Line stopped as the sheriff sought answers. He soon identified the woman as sixty-three-year-old Sarah Wastler from Yellow Springs. She had waited alongside the track for the trolley to arrive to commit suicide.

The authorities notified her husband, David E. Wastler of Yellow Springs. David said his wife had a mental illness. Not only had she tried to commit suicide previously, she had also threatened to kill him and some of their eight children.

David had sworn out a warrant against his wife a few years earlier, saying Sarah was abusive and a public nuisance. He told the judge “she had threatened to kill the members of her family if not allowed to spend the money of her husband in riding upon the cars and enjoying herself in Frederick,” according to the Frederick Post.

David said his wife had abused the customers in his shoemaking shop and scared them away. “He said conditions had become so bad in the last year and that ofttimes he would sleep in his shop rather than go home and be tormented by his wife,” according to the Frederick Post.

Because of her “insane” actions, he could not hire someone to watch her while he was at work.

David told one story of how he had purchased lard to be used for cooking. However, Sarah took half of it just to waste and use for something other than cooking, so he locked up the other half because it was needed for cooking. Sarah took an axe and broke into the locked room just to take the rest of the lard and also waste it. Another time, she wasted their firewood, meant to get them through the winter, by building a large bonfire.

Then David said Sarah threatened to kill their son, Lee, and went after him with a knife. Lee was able to get the knife away from her, though, so he hadn’t been injured. Lee told the judge that “his mother had thrown knives and forks at him and that she was continually saying she was going to have him sent to the House of Correction.”

Justice Anders corroborated this and added that Lee was a good kid who did not belong there.

Other witnesses testified that Sarah would scream so loudly that it could be heard a quarter mile away, and she was always trying to have warrants served on different people.

Sarah is buried in the Faith United Church of Christ Cemetery in Charlesville. Even after death, she left one last headache for her husband. Sarah apparently ran up a large number of bills, buying things she didn’t need. David only found out about this after her death because he ran notices in the Frederick Post that he wouldn’t be held responsible for bills Sarah incurred unbeknownst to him.

The Hagerstown and Frederick Trolley traveling through the countryside on its way to Thurmont.

Looking Back – 1917

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The Jinx of Old Frederick Road

by James Rada, Jr.

Old Frederick Road used to be the main thoroughfare between Thurmont and Frederick in 1917. It wasn’t the safest roadway, though. The Catoctin Clarion claimed it had a “jinx” on it. As evidence, it offered four different mishaps suffered on the road during a  September weekend. Not only were they different accidents, they were different types of accidents.

The first problem happened Saturday evening when a car struck Thomas Baker while he was crossing the road. Baker was thrown back over the front-wheel fender, and the only injuries he suffered was when he scratched his face on the road surface. The apparent cause of the accident was that the driver of the vehicle couldn’t see Baker, because the lights from oncoming traffic were too bright and blinded him.

Near midnight on Saturday, Charles Fogle was driving a seven-passenger Overland automobile, carrying Archie Elrode, Clarence School, Grayson Schell, and Arthur Clabaugh. He crashed into a carriage carrying Mr. and Mrs. Frank Angle and Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Cramer, all of Walkersville.

No one was seriously hurt, although the carriage was completely destroyed and the car badly damaged. According to the Clarion, “The tires were stripped from both right wheels and the front axle forced back under the center of the car. The fenders on the right side were crushed.”

On Sunday during the day, two cars hooked their front wheels together somehow while traveling down the state road about a half mile south of Thurmont. Because neither car could drive properly, they both wound up in a ditch.

The drivers weren’t injured, and the cars were driveable once they were pulled from the ditch and disconnected.

The final incident was the most-unusual of the four. Late Sunday afternoon, G. W. Shoemaker was driving a car carrying Harry Trout, Earl Heifleigh, Hallie Crum, and Bertha Crum. Near Catoctin Furnace, a cow made a sudden turn and walked into the road before Shoemaker could avoid it. The car hit the cow, knocking it down, and the front tires of the car passed over the animal.

“Objecting to being underneath, the cow gave a hump and tossed the car to the side of the road and into a ditch,” the Catoctin Clarion reported.

One of the female passengers flew through the roof of the car while Shoemaker was trapped beneath it.

  1. W. Lidie was passing nearby and saw the accident. He stopped his own car and rushed over to help Shoemaker out from beneath his vehicle and administer first aid. The car was damaged, although it was salvageable. No one was seriously injured except the cow.

Lidie sent his family home to Thurmont while he drove the passengers of the wrecked car to their homes in Liberty.

Car vs. person, car vs. carriage, car vs. car, and car vs. cow. The road jinx didn’t discriminate. Luckily, no one was killed in any of these accidents, which may be because the cars weren’t traveling at the speeds they do nowadays.

Looking Back – 1917

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Galt Starts the Effort to Recognize Thomas Johnson

by James Rada, Jr.

Thomas Johnson was the first governor of Maryland, serving from March 21, 1777, to November 12, 1779. “John Adams said that Governor Thomas Johnson of Maryland was one out of four citizens of Maryland and Virginia without whom there would have been no revolution,” John Williamson Palmer wrote in Century Magazine.

Johnson was one of the forgotten Founding Fathers, which was a problem that Sterling Galt of Emmitsburg set out to correct in 1917.

Sterling Galt purchased the Emmitsburg Chronicle in 1906. He was the fourth owner of the twenty-seven-year-old newspaper. Back in those days, small newspapers had few employees. The owner was the publisher and the primary reporter. Galt was very active in the community and had shown that he had political aspirations with a failed run for the state senate in 1911.

In January 1917, he met with a group of similarly civic-minded men in the office of the school commissioner in Frederick. There, the group formed the Thomas Johnson Memorial Association and elected Galt its president and William Delaplaine the secretary. The group’s mission was to have a suitable memorial created for Maryland’s first governor and Frederick County resident, Thomas Johnson. The men planned to solicit donations of no more than a dime to fund the memorial.

Before the group could build up any steam, World War I started. A few fundraising drives were conducted, but people wanted to send money to support the troops, not build a memorial. Then, Galt died on December 28, 1922, and it seemed like his organization would die as well.

Then in 1926, life returned to the group. It reorganized and began holding meetings. Not only did they praise Johnson’s service as governor, but he had also been an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, a member of the Continental Congress, and the man who nominated George Washington as the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

“The people of Frederick County have long felt that some recognition of his invaluable services to the State and to the nation should be given, and some suitable memorial erected here in Frederick to his memorial.”

A bust of Thomas Johnson was sculpted in clay by Joseph Urner in 1926. However, since all funds were being publicly raised, it wasn’t until years later that it could be finally cast in bronze.

The bronze bust in Courthouse Park was finally unveiled in 1929. It sat on a granite base with a plaque that listed many of Johnson’s accomplishments. The speakers at the event included Judge T. Scott Offutt, president of the Maryland Society, Sons of the American Revolution, and Charles Francis Adams, U.S. Secretary of Navy and the great-grandson of John Adams.

Galt’s efforts in organizing the group that eventually made the memorial a reality were noted in the speeches.

Some of Offutt’s comments seem oddly prescient of today and what eventually happened to the memorial.

“We stand in a different world from the one he knew,” Offutt said. “Manners, morals, methods, and indeed the whole face of civilization have changed.”

He then went on to criticize a society that was letting itself drift into “paternal socialism” and losing the freedoms that Johnson’s generation had won for the country. “The press does our thinking for us, the state guards our morals, boards and commissions of one kind or another manage our affairs, and hordes of bureaucratic officials consume our substance and pester and bedevil us with ‘don’ts’ and ‘musts’ until we are afraid to call our lives our own…” Offutt said.

In 2015, the bust of Johnson was caught up in the controversy surrounding another Frederick County resident and Supreme Court justice who had a bronze bust in the park. Roger Brooke Taney is known for delivering the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857, which said that slaves could not be American citizens. Johnson became part of the controversy because he was a slaveowner and that outweighed the good he had done for the country.

On March 18, 2017, both the Scott and Johnson busts were removed from in front of the courthouse. They will be refurbished and placed on display in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

Photo of the bust of Thomas Johnson, courtesy of Waymarking.com.