The Chariton Cemetery is home to a good number of permanent residents who had no real relationship with Lucas County but were buried near where they fell, including the unfortunate Alfred Anderson. Mr. Anderson had the additional challenges of being wrongly identified at death, then exhumed and reburied so that positive identification could be made.
Anderson, 59, was a day laborer employed by Donald Jeffrey, a contractor building bridges on the new Rock Island Railroad line under construction through Lucas County during 1911 when he was killed. The death was reported in The Herald-Patriot of Sept. 21 as follows. The victim was misidentified as "Andrew" rather than as "Alfred" Anderson, a mistake also embedded in Lucas County death records.
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While unloading a train of dump cars on a trestle at the first camp of Donald Jeffrey, about five miles northeast of Chariton, last Thursday afternoon at two o'clock, part of the trestle collapsed, throwing the cars into the ditch. Andrew Anderson, one of the men working on the trestle was killed, something striking him in the face as he fell. Two other workmen named John Miller, but no relation to each other, were injured, one having his right arm broken and the other his nose and cheek bones broken. Both were brought to Mercy Hospital and are being cared for there. Another man, Andy Horan, was bruised in the face, but did not go to the hospital. Only part of the trestle collapsed, and on the end that did not fall there were six other men working. Had the whole trestle given away there would probably have been others killed or badly injured.
The dead man was taken to Froggat's undertaking rooms where Coroner John Stanton held an inquest over his body on Friday, with Frank Darrah, W.C. Largey, and Chester Wilson as the jury. They returned a verdict of accidental death, not placing any blame for carelessness on anyone. The body was interred in the Chariton cemetery on Saturday afternoon, with short services at the grave by Rev Aszman.
Deceased has no family or relatives, so far as is known, except a son who is either in Alliance, Nebr., or somewhere in South Dakota. He was aged about fifty years.
This is the first accident of the kind that Mr. Jeffrey has ever had in his many years of railroad building. He has always been particularly careful to have his trestles even stronger than seemed necessary, and this trestle was inspected only a couple of days before the accident, and seemed sound and in good condition. What caused its collapse is not known, unless it was a defective timber that looked sound. Mr. Jeffrey is doing everything possible for the comfort of the men who were injured.
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Two weeks later, in their editions of October 5, both The Leader and The Herald-Patriot reported that Mr. Anderson's son, identified by the Herald-Patriot as H.G. Anderson of Alliance, Nebraska, had visited Chariton to identify the remains of his father. Here's The Leader report, the most detailed of the two:
Attorney W.W. Bulman located the son of the gentleman, Anderson by name, who was recently killed on the railroad works out north of Chariton by the falling of a trestle. The young man arrived from a Nebraska point yesterday and asked to have the body exhumed to see if he could identify the dead man as his father, whom he had not seen for several years. The state board of health was communicated with, who gave the local board authority to act, so the body was exhumed and the young man identified the dead man as his father, after which the remains were re-interred. It seems that the deceased had been divorced from his wife, and had not been with his family for several years.
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Alfred Anderson, after all his troubles, was given a small but decent tombstone. Although it's difficult to read, the inscription identifies him as "Brother" and gives his dates as July 1852-Sept. 14, 1911. So apparently, in addition to a son who went to considerable trouble to identify him, Mr. Anderson also had a sibling who thought enough of him to mark his grave.
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