Early rail travel as part of local history will be explored Thursday night during a presentation by St. Bonaventure Professor Chris Dalton and others.
The 6PM March 30 event, at the Cuba Circulating Library, will reflect work by the St. Bonaventure University History Department and its students, in coordination with the library and some community local historians, to understand how historic events on a national scale are able to reflect the life and times of people at more localized level.
In the Cuba Cemetery, for example, stands an obelisk which memorializes the life and tragic death of Hiram Chamberlain, who perished in the Ashtabula Railway Disaster on a blizzardy evening on December 29, 1876.
The calamity, now a distant memory of the hazards of early train travel, according to the library, once occupied the attention of the entire nation. Even now, oit reports, the collapse of the Ashtabula Bridge and the plummeting of the Lake Shore & Michigan passenger train to the bottom of the gulch remains one of the deadliest train accidents in American history.
The library is located at 39 East Main Street.