Mays Landing's Forgotten Train Disaster Comes to Light

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In Mays Landing, New Jersey, the old wooden trestle over the Great Egg Harbor River was a childhood playground for locals for decades. However, this trestle hides a tragic past - in 1880, a devastating train crash occurred there that claimed around 80 lives, making it one of the deadliest rail accidents in 19th-century South Jersey. Despite the scale of the disaster, the story faded from local memory for nearly 100 years, until recent historical research uncovered the forgotten details.

Why it matters

The 1880 Mays Landing train crash highlights how major historical events can be suppressed or forgotten over time, especially when there are incentives for the involved parties, like the railroad company, to downplay the incident. This story sheds light on how local tragedies can be erased from collective memory, and the importance of historical research in bringing these forgotten stories back to life.

The details

On August 11, 1880, over a thousand members of church groups from Philadelphia were returning from an excursion to Atlantic City by train on the West Jersey Railroad. The passengers were split into two trains for the return trip. As the first train slowed and had not fully cleared the single-track stretch near Mays Landing, the second train slammed into the rear cars. The collision was devastating, with wooden passenger cars telescoping into each other and the locomotive's boiler exploding. Around 80 people were killed or injured in the crash, a staggering number for the small town of Mays Landing, which had a population of only a few hundred at the time.

• On August 11, 1880, the train crash occurred near Mays Landing.
• For decades after the crash, the story was barely spoken about in Mays Landing.

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