Mahoney - Nora - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

On Sunday at Cincinnati a motor car became unmanageable and ran over a mile finally crashing against a telephone pole. Several persons were killed or fatally injured, among the latter being Miss Nora Mahoney, of this city.

The girl is a sister of John Mahoney, who resides near the Monon station. She was formerly in Bischol’s store but for three years past has resided in Cincinnati. She was well known here. She was a pleasant girl and well liked by all. The family received word last night that she could not possibly recover, her skull being terribly fractured. Miss Mahoney is in the city hospital with no chance of recovery.

The Commercial Gazette thus graphically describes the terrible accident:

A car became unmanageable at McGregor Avenue and after a wild flight of over a mile jumped the track at Broadway, crashed into a telephone pole and one passenger was killed, three fatally injured and twenty six others more or less, seriously hurt.

Three minutes of mortal terror, whirling along through the clouds of dust, in a runaway car at a speed that, at the finish is described as close to one hundred miles an hour, is an experience that will never be effaced from the memory of those who passed through its horrors and will live to tell the tale.

For more than a mile the runaway car, itself weighing several tons, with its load of precious freight, shot with a velocity seldom attained in the most seditious railway traveling, and the wonder of all was that it kept the rails as long as it did. Down the steep grades the terrible specter shot past wide eyed and open mouthed pedestrians, and along the level grades it coasted, and then, a quarter of a mile from the finish, took the plunge that could end only in death and destruction.

It struck the sharp curves in the road with jolts that huddled the passengers together in heaps and even despite the efforts of the cool headed crew, who tried to throw it from the rails, it held to them with a pertinacity that surely was predetermined by fate.

On, on it went for about a mile, when a steep declivity was reached and the plunge down this meant death. Down it went striking a huge spar and carrying it till the car struck the supporting pillar of the doorway of a brick house on the corner, and, although this pillar was of stone, twenty by twenty inches in thickness, it was torn from its place and shivered to pieces.

But the occupants of the car, they who took that terrible ride, of them? Twenty were borne away to the hospitals in the swift and ever ready patrol wagons, and one poor thing, a little girl with a pretty face and long, dark hair, now matted with blood, was lifted tenderly to the stretchers and carried to the morgue. She was dead when taken from the wreck, and for several hours was unidentified. Of the others, several are so badly hurt that they cannon recover, while others, although they may regain health and strength, will carry the marks of their injuries to their dying day. -s