100 years ago in The Saratogian

Thursday, May 31, 1917

A 16-year-old Ballston Spa girl is killed tonight when she’s struck by a train while walking home along the tracks, The Saratogian reports.

Investigators believe that Mary Gorman died instantly when the engine and fifteen cars of a southbound freight train. Her companion, 17 year old Anna Mullin, is clipped by the engine but not run over; she suffers a broken left arm, a three inch scalp wound, a cut forehead and lacerations on her legs.

Engineer L. C. Heberling is making fast time to get over a reverse curve when he sees the girls step onto the track, six feet in front of the engine, to avoid a northbound train. “He applied the emergency brakes, but owing to the speed of the train and the weight he did not succeed in stopping it until his engine reached the station.”

Mullen tells a coroner that she was walking Gorman home and “had walked only a little ways, to the culvert, when they heard a train coming from the south. It was a freight train and made considerable noise. They stepped out of the way of this train and to the southbound track.”

Rescuers find Mullen on her feet screaming, but she doesn’t remember hearing the southbound train or being hit by it.

YADDO FLAG RAISING

Katrina Trask, one of Saratoga Springs’ leading arts figures, recently donated forty acres of land on her Yaddo property to the nation’s wartime food production drive. In her honor, a detail of schoolgirl gardeners hold a flag-raising ceremony today.

Trask provided the girl gardeners with plows and fertilizer and gave them access to one of her buildings for tool storage and shelter during inclement weather. The author is unable to attend today’s flag raising due to a bout of bronchitis.

“May wind and weather be propitious,” Trask writes the gardeners, “May the seeds blossom and bear fruit and may success crown your ardent efforts.”

YMCA

More than $1,300 is pledged tonight to a Y.M.C.A. fund for “safeguarding the morals” of soldiers preparing for war, The Saratogian reports.

The pledges follow a presentation by Rev. Joseph H. Odell of Troy at the Saratoga Club. “Our men must be clean, morally and physically, if we are to win,” he says, “Experience has shown us that some other force than the government must protect them in their leisure hours.”

The Y hopes to make recreation facilities available to soldiers in the U.S. and Europe. “Every effort is made to keep them morally clean, to teach them the dangers that lurk on the outside of every camp,” Odell explains.