| Sources |
- [S112] Census, 1860.
Name George M Parrott
Event Type Census
Event Date 1860
Event Place 10th District, Greene, Tennessee, United States
Gender Male
Age 1
Race White
Race (Original) [Blank]
Birth Year (Estimated) 1859
Birthplace Tennessee
Page 89
Household
Role
Sex
Age
Birthplace
Henry Guggenhimer M 38 Bavaria
Jeady Guggenhimer F 22 Bavaria
Marcus C Guggenhimer M 2 Virginia
Dora Guggenhimer F 0 Virginia
Henry Guggenhimer M 21 Bavaria
Herman Myers M 13 Bavaria
John Mitchell M 52 Tennessee
Annie Mitchell F 42 Tennessee
Harriett Mitchell F 19 Tennessee
William Mitchell M 15 Tennessee
James Mitchell M 18 Tennessee
David Mitchell M 11 Tennessee
Margaret Mitchell F 8 Tennessee
Cathrn Mitchell F 6 Tennessee
Ammy A Mitchell F 4 Tennessee
John Mitchell M 3 Tennessee
Minny B W Mitchell F 2 Tennessee
Elizbth Parrott F 22 Tennessee
George M Parrott M 1 Tennessee
- [S112] Census, 1880.
Name George M Parrott
Event Type Census
Event Date 1880
Event Place Parrottsville, Cocke, Tennessee, United States
Gender Male
Age 21
Race White
Race (Original) W
Occupation Cabinet Maker
Relationship to Head of Household Self
Relationship to Head of Household (Original) Self
Birth Year (Estimated) 1859
Birthplace Tennessee, United States
Father's Birthplace Tennessee, United States
Mother's Birthplace Tennessee, United States
Sheet Letter A
Sheet Number 336
Person Number 0
Volume 1
Household
Role
Sex
Age
Birthplace
George M Parrott Self M 21 Tennessee, United States
Calvin Smith Other M 10 Tennessee, United States
"United States Census, 1880," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GYB2-D79?cc=1417683&wc=QZ24-628%3A1589414125%2C1589414794%2C1589414839%2C1589395213 : 24 December 2015), Tennessee > Cocke > Parrottsville > ED 60 > image 1 of 28; citing NARA microfilm publication T9 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).
- [S112] Census, 1900.
Name Geo M Parott
Event Type Census
Event Year 1900
Event Place Civil District 1 Knoxville city Ward 7, Knox, Tennessee, United States
Gender Male
Age 42
Marital Status Married
Race White
Race (Original) W
Relationship to Head of Household Head
Relationship to Head of Household (Original) Head
Years Married 13
Birth Date Oct 1858
Birthplace Tennessee
Marriage Year (Estimated) 1887
Father's Birthplace Tennessee
Mother's Birthplace Tennessee
Household
Role
Sex
Age
Birthplace
Geo M Parott Head M 42 Tennessee
Lucinda Parott Wife F 37 Tennessee
Mamie C Parott Daughter F 12 Tennessee
Anna L Parott Daughter F 10 Tennessee
Cathaline Parott Daughter F 9 Tennessee
Lillian W Parott Daughter F 2 Tennessee
Dora B Parott Daughter F 0 Tennessee
Corda Clark Niece F 18 Tennessee
"United States Census, 1900," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-63VS-24Z?cc=1325221&wc=9B7Y-WQ7%3A1030551301%2C1031356301%2C1035049101 : 5 August 2014), Tennessee > Knox > ED 63 Civil District 1 Knoxville city Ward 7 > image 10 of 38; citing NARA microfilm publication T623 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).
- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 29 Jan 2012.
Deadly New Market wreck still echoes through area
Rescuers recover a body from New Market train wreck Sept. 24, 1904, an accident that killed at least 64 people and injured more than 100 others. On that morning at 10:18 a.m., the Carolina Special out of Chattanooga collided head-on with westbound No. 15 on a track bordering property owned by Joseph Johnson Whitaker. (Alice Coker/Special to the News Sentinel)
By Fred Brown
NEW MARKET, Tenn. — John Coker stares at a thick, black rectangular smudge that runs along a section of the north bank of Lost Creek, a small stream that eventually disappears into a cave system.
The dark vein, about a foot wide and perhaps two feet long, is not a coal seam. Rather, it is the result of years of train debris packed and compressed into the earth when locomotives ran on steam powered by coal furnaces.
"You are standing in the middle of a catastrophe," says Coker, grandson of the man who was an eyewitness to one of the most catastrophic train wrecks in Tennessee history.
Known as the New Market Train Wreck, the accident killed at least 64 people and injured more than 100 others.
The creek rambles along what is today the mainline of Norfolk-Southern Railway's Tennessee Division, about 23 miles east of Knoxville in Jefferson County.
Here on Sept. 24, 1904, on a bright, clear morning along this previously nondescript creek bank, one of the deadliest head-on railroad accidents in U.S. and Tennessee history occurred.
On that morning at 10:18 a.m., the Carolina Special out of Chattanooga was pulling nine cars, three of them packed with passengers — many of whom were returning home from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the World's Fair — when it collided head-on with westbound No. 15, which was pulling three passenger cars.
The rail line is adjacent to the stream, which cut away the earth to expose the coal smear. The creek borders land that belongs to Coker, whose family home, built in 1869, stands just up and over a rise south of the creek.
The farm was part of his grandfather Joseph Johnson Whitaker's property, which was first owned by his father, Henry Clay Whitaker, a Civil War veteran who fought with Gen. George Custer.
Working in his fields harvesting corn that morning, Joe Whitaker witnessed the devastating collision that still ranks as one of the state's worst locomotive head-on collisions.
He was one of the first to reach the accident, which took place less than 100 yards from where he was working. He can be seen in many of the historic photographs standing at the crash site.
"He's the one in the straw hat," says Alice Coker, Joe Whitaker's daughter, and John Coker's mother. Alice Coker, now 95, was not yet born when the accident happened.
"But my sister (Marion) and I pestered our father to tell us about the accident when we were young," she says while sitting in the living room of her home.
"He was in the field gathering corn down by the creek. He heard the trains coming and knew there would be a crash."
Doors on the passenger car began to fly open, she says.
"The sound of the crash was heard for miles," Alice Coker says.
Her son, John, once asked Ada Wooten, Alice Coker's aunt, about that sound. She lived a mile above the accident.
"She told me that it wasn't like an explosion, but sounded like steam or wind moving through the trees and limbs."
One story Alice Coker recalled hearing from her father was about a boxcar full of chickens. Somehow, she says, a man from the baggage car wound up in the middle of the car with the chickens.
"My father said the chickens had gathered around the man in a circle. He was in the center."
John Coker says that walking the same field that his grandfather once plowed gives him an eerie feeling.
"It is so quiet here now. But when you think what happened here ..." He didn't finish his sentence.
Mike Clabough, who owns the neighboring farm where he raises feeder cattle, strolls through the wiregrass with Coker.
He says that he has walked both his and Coker's fields and down the creek searching for artifacts from the wreck, which will be 108 years old this September.
"I have taken a metal detector all over here," he says. The detector got so many hits, he says, that he stopped searching.
"You'd dig down and see where a bolt from the train had just rusted out and left its imprint in the soil. But when the water is down, you can see stuff in the creek."
He points to rocks once used along the rail bed.
The late Farragut author John P. Ashcer, who wrote what is undoubtedly the definitive history of the wreck, has documented even more casualties than those that have been officially reported.
In his book, "New Market Wreck," Ascher writes, "Exhaustive research for this book identifies 113 dead and 205 injured ... 44 seriously injured who may have expired shortly after the wreck, and not yet identified as fatalities. The total casualties now stand at 318."
The disastrous wreck has drawn a great deal of scrutiny over the years. To this day it is still something of a mystery as to why the westbound No. 15 train from Bristol didn't stop at New Market as it was supposed to do.
Instead, the train blew by New Market at a high rate of speed, heading for Hodges Switch, just below the Whitaker property along the rail line.
No. 15 was under the hand of Engineer William Kane of Knoxville, and George Parrott of Knoxville was the engineer for eastbound No. 12.
Hodges Switch, a small siding where the two trains normally passed each other, is about one mile below the Whitaker property where the crash took place. On this day, however, both trains were to stop in New Market to let each other pass.Parrott, a man with 20 years' experience, was at the throttle of the larger of the two locomotives. The big engine was just getting up a full head of speed after passing Hodges Switch. Parrott's locomotive outweighed the other engine by 15 tons, according to Ascher.
At the same time, No. 15 under Kane speeding west was on a downward slope into a curve just before reaching the siding. He was about one mile from the siding.
Just as Parrott's locomotive rounded the blind curve, coming out of the trees along Lost Creek that morning, he saw that Kane's No. 15 engine was almost on top of him. Immediately he threw on his air brakes and tried to put the big engine in reverse.
From his vantage point in the field just above the scene, Joe Whitaker later said he realized that the two trains were bound on a collision course. He heard them both coming in opposite directions on the single line track, which had been built in the mid-1850s.
He tied up his two young mules to the corn wagon and waited.
Ascher estimates the speed of the two trains at 110 miles per hour. Westbound No. 15's engine catapulted end-over-end on top of No. 12, landing squarely on the wooden passenger cars.
Wiley Morgan, then managing editor of the old Knoxville Sentinel when the wreck occurred, was in charge of the news staff and directed coverage of the disaster. In 1944, he wrote his recollection of that day's events.
Morgan said original newspaper estimates reported 50 killed and 125 injured. In later stories, the number of those killed was revised to 63.
Every coach of the eastbound train, he said, was demolished, and both train engineers perished. Miraculously no one else on the westbound train was killed.
Morgan had a corps of three reporters and one photographer at the scene within two hours after the wreck.
"In those days good roads were unknown. Automobiles of the two-cylinder type were few and none would hazard the treacherous and almost impassable dirt roads from Knoxville to the Jefferson County scene of disaster," he wrote.
"The Sentinel appealed to an automobile dealer to lease a car for the trip, offering $100 spot cash but the offer was declined."
Morgan said that the "reporters and photographer proved their resourcefulness in persuading railroad operatives much against their will to permit them to board one of the wrecking trains en route to the scene," Morgan wrote.
"This (was) with the understanding and agreement that the news seekers would disembark before reaching the wreckage."
Pictures of the wreck published in the Sentinel on the following Monday were the first such illustrations to appear in a Knoxville newspaper, Morgan said.
Morgan said that this event "marked an epoch in local journalism, and thereby hangs another story. So fearful of the power of pictorial publicity were officials of the Southern Railway that its legal department in Washington directed a local attorney to use every possible means of preventing the publication of these pictures.
"The local lawyer sought to purchase the negatives or films offering to pay any price, but The Sentinel refused and the pictures featured the first page of The Sentinel of Monday, Sept. 26, which issue gave the dead at 64 and the injured at 141."
Reporters on the scene were Dortch Campbell, Jesse S. Cottrell and Carl Elmore. The photographer was Earl Harrison.
Writing about his reporters, Morgan said Campbell "won fame as a reporter and editor in the west. Carl Elmore made an enviable reputation as a Louisville newspaper man after leaving Knoxville. Jesse S. Cottrell became minister to Bolivia, and at time of his death ... he was one of the most influential and best-loved newsmen of the national capital.
"Earl Harrison won renown as a globe-trotting photographer whose pictures made in every clime, (were) featured (in) National Geographic and other exclusive publications.
"The Sentinel's coverage of the story taxed both the mechanical facilities of the newspaper and the imagination and inventive genius of the limited but loyal and aggressive staff."
- [S147] Find a Grave, (Memorial: 100887810).
- [S58] Marriage Certificate.
Name George W Parrott
Event Type Marriage
Event Date 24 Sep 1857
Event Place Greene, Tennessee, United States
Gender Male
Spouse's Name Mary E Mitchell
Spouse's Gender Female
"Tennessee, County Marriages, 1790-1950," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-YSQ9-MY6D?cc=1619127&wc=Q6SB-L8T%3A1589264540%2C1589373230 : 22 December 2016), Greene > Marriage records, 1857-1861, book 3, no 294-1080 > image 168 of 3198; citing Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville and county clerk offices from various counties.
- [S58] Marriage Certificate.
Name George M Parrott
Event Type Marriage
Event Date 18 Mar 1887
Event Place Hamblen, Tennessee, United States
Gender Male
Spouse's Name Lula Clark
Spouse's Gender Female
Page 49
"Tennessee, County Marriages, 1790-1950," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-YSQ9-3DXW?cc=1619127&wc=Q6SB-LFS%3A1589264634%2C1589373356 : 22 December 2016), Hamblen > Marriage records, 1870-1882, Morgan & Blanton -Soard & Smith > image 54 of 2546; citing Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville and county clerk offices from various counties.
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