N.C. Wyeth: Tragedy Strikes

"Winter Death" by N.C. Wyeth

"The Octoraro Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad intersected Ring Road at a grade crossing one mile from the village of Chadds Ford, less than a mile from the Wyeth Homestead. A small oval crossing sign, rusted but bearing the old warning, STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN, stood as the safety signal alongside the tracks.

The rural road approached the rail crossing at an odd, forty-degree angle. Just before reaching the railroad embankment, the road also made two rises, mounting one last incline before crossing the tracks. On the side from which N.C. was approaching, trees grew thick and close along the embankment. The only way to have a clear view down the tracks was to hurl the station wagon onto them and then lean forward over the wheel.

Breasting the crossing that morning, N.C.'s car came suddenly to a halt. A train was approaching from the city. As soon as the engineer saw the station wagon on the tracks, he slammed on the air brakes. He sounded his whistle and bell, but the car did not move, and no one got out of it. The engineer knew that it was too late to stop. 

The collision occurred at seventeen minutes past nine. The train crushed the driver's side of the station wagon, then dragged the car 143 feet down the rails, before tossing the heap against a signal control and derailing itself. Miraculously, none of the train crew was injured. For the Wyeths, the calamity was total. Both N.C.  and his grandson were killed. Little Newell was a month shy of his fourth birthday. N.C. would have been sixty-three on Monday. The date was Friday, October 19th.

In Chadds Ford two coffins, one massive, one child size, lay open at Birmingham Friends Meetinghouse. On Sunday afternoon, October 21, the family gathered at three o'clock for the funeral service. It was a spectacular day in the valley, brilliant with light and color. The pews were jammed. Survived by all his brothers, all his children, by Carol, by his old colleagues in illustration at the Howard Pyle School - Ashley, Aylward, Chase, Dunn, Peck, Schoonover - N.C. seemed to have died much too soon. With Newell alongside him, and the valley all around, he was buried in the graveyard behind the meetinghouse."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "N.C. Wyeth" by David Michaelis.)