CONTRIBUTED GRAPHIC ”Green Mountain: Iowa’s Deadliest Train Wreck” is a new book chronicling the 1910 disaster near the Marshall-Tama County line by Marion-based author and historian Scott Foens.

GREEN MOUNTAIN — On March 21, 1910, a train derailment near the Marshall/Tama county line (four miles northeast of Green Mountain) resulted in the worst railroad accident in Iowa history. More than 50 people died and about 40 more were injured. The day was emblazoned in the memories of survivors and first responders, with the history having been passed on through the generations. Now, a new book is sorting fact from fiction about that fateful day.

Marion-based author and historian Scott Foens has dedicated years to researching the accident, and his findings are revealed in his book “Green Mountain: Iowa’s Deadliest Train Wreck,” published by South Platte Press.

He explains that right before midnight, a freight train fell through a bridge at Shellsburg, requiring the Rock Island Line trains to be diverted from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo over Chicago Great Western tracks via Marshalltown. The trains involved were the No. 21 St Louis-Twin Cities and No. 19 Chicago-Twin Cities, combined into an 11-car train with the two locomotives traveling backwards, tender first. The lead engine left the tracks and hit a clay embankment, coming to a sudden stop.

“The Pullman sleeper car was the first one behind the locomotive, then it was the two wooden day cars, and then it was everything else,” he said. “Well, everything else pushed the wooden day cars into the Pullman, and that’s what killed everybody. So anybody who was not in one of the first three cars wasn’t directly affected by this wreck…The people that were on the Chicago section of the train just got off their coaches and walked up to the St Louis section, and that’s where they saw gore everywhere. We would consider it a PTSD reaction today.”

Experts testified to the Iowa Board of Railroad Commissioners inquest that the Rock Island train was estimated to be traveling about 22 miles per hour when it left the rails.

Foens said a marker honoring the spot of the accident is at the correct place, but on the wrong side of the road.

“It appears that the actual crash itself occurred just on the east side of the gravel road, as opposed to on the west side,” he said.

Foens, a former paramedic, writes about emergency services and disaster history. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Wichita State University, a Master of Arts in history from the University of Nebraska and a MBA from Saint Ambrose University.

In 1996, he penned a piece on the Highway Safety Act of 1966 for the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services,” among other publishing credits. Upon beginning work on his master’s thesis (published in 2023), he came across the Green Mountain incident.

“I was planning on doing my master’s thesis on the evolution of emergency medical care in Iowa from 1900 through about 1972, and was going through the process of researching the first chapter, where I was going to kind of set the stage for what emergency medical care looked like, and came across the Green Mountain train derailment,” he noted. “Well, as I dug further and further and found all of this source material, I decided it made more sense to simply write about Green Mountain because there were no books out there about that.”

Up until that point, Foens notes, the only other work was a 1984 article written by H Roger Grant in “The Palimpsest.”

Foens also studied the Iowa Board of Railroad Commissioner’s investigation, articles through newspaper archives, and materials made available by the Historical Society of Marshall County, plus area historians.

“What I found was that the way the Railroad Commission investigation and then also the way H Roger Grant characterized this wreck, was fundamentally wrong,” he said. “Setting aside the issues as to train car order and that kind of thing, which was incorrect, what I found was that everybody focused on why that train derailed, and that’s the wrong question. It doesn’t matter so much why the train derailed. What matters is why did it kill 52 passengers and then ultimately lead to the death of Teddy Roosevelt’s Secret Service guy (John Steibling) from the Treasury Department, and also Dr. Elijah Jay, who was the coroner for Marshall County at that time. That was the right question…And that takes us into how that route got planned, and also what the underlying construction philosophy was when the diagonal was first built in 1882 and 1883 when it was the Wisconsin, Iowa and Nebraska rail line.”

Steibling had been pinned in the wreckage and required rescuers to extricate him. He “died suddenly” at his home in New York City on March 29. Foens uncovered that the Associated Press reported the man died “from a nervous strain following the recent disastrous wreck at Marshalltown” and feels it was a euphemism for suicide.

Dr. Elijah William Jay fell from an ambulance heading to the hospital from the wreck, which ruptured a hernia he had been suffering. He died of complications a short time later in May.

Foens noted determining the exact number of casualties for an accident in that era has its challenges.

“In 1910, counties were not particularly diligent about recording fatalities,” he said.

There were two funeral homes and around 20-30 doctors in Marshalltown at the time, with additional nursing staff and mortuary services being brought in to assist, he points out.

“When I looked at the log for death records — because they didn’t do death certificates at that time they just simply recorded it in a ledger — I counted about 46, but there were more that died than that, and I ended up going through newspapers and matching up names to death records, looking for consistent patterns, specific obituaries, and that’s where I ended up finding more names than the log has there in Marshalltown,” he explained of his research.

The wounded were brought to St. Thomas Mercy Hospital in Marshalltown, which opened in 1903.

“St. Thomas predominantly were private apartments that were paid for and sponsored by prominent residents or religious institutions, and then they had wards also, and that’s where people convalesced,” he said. “They didn’t necessarily go there for treatment, per se. That’s kind of one of the things to note when we think about hospitals as we know them today — they really didn’t evolve and develop until about the mid-1920s.”

Foens has launched a book tour, and will present his findings from 2 to 4 p.m. June 22 at the Marshalltown Public Library, sponsored by the Historical Society of Marshall County.

His book is available to purchase at events and on his website: www.scottfoens.com.