Description
Within the cool, pre-first light hours on a June night in 1918, a train engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond, Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down at the idle Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer’s locomotive plowed into the circus train. Within the subsequent wreckage and blaze, more than 2 hundred circus performers were injured and eighty-six were killed, so much of whom were interred in a mass grave Within the Showmen’s Rest portion of Chicago’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Sign up for local historian Richard Lytle as he recounts, Within the fullest retelling to this point, the main points of this tragedy and its role Within the overall evolution and demise of a novel entertainment industry.