Pottstown area people in maritime disasters

POTTSTOWN >> Pottstown area women have over the years been a part of some of history’s most famous maritime disasters.

On Sept. 5, 1934, four Pottstown residents: Agnes Prince and her sister, Ruth, their friend Evelyn Henricks, daughter of Pottstown pretzel manufacturer Willis Henricks, and Madeline Finn Drummond, who was on her honeymoon, were among the passengers on the luxury liner, Morro Castle, when it sailed away from New York City on a round-trip pleasure cruise to Havana, Cuba.

On the return leg, just a few miles off the New Jersey coast, the ship was engulfed by a roaring fire that forced most of the passengers to strap on their life vests and jump into an ocean where the waves were running 20 to 30 feet high. Though 137 people died in that catastrophe, the four Pottstown women lived to tell their stories.

The other two were not as fortunate as the Morro Castle quartet. On April 15, 1912, Annie Funk, a Mennonite missionary school teacher working in India, was aboard the Titanic on her journey back home to visit her sick mother in Butter Valley, just a mile or two north of Boyertown.

When the ship hit an iceberg and finally sank in the early morning hours of April 15, Funk was one of the 1,517 people who died in the North Atlantic’s frigid waters.

Then there is Mary Buchanan, a native of Scotland living in North Coventry Township, Chester County, who died when a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, during World War I.