A Tragedy in Yellow Springs

The "mystery tower" of Yellow Springs

Aside from a mysterious stone tower which nobody can seem to explain and a few crumbling foundations, the lush expanse of St. Anthony's Wilderness has swallowed up the village of Yellow Springs, one of the many ghost towns that can be found along the trail where the Dauphin & Susquehanna Railroad once ran.

Completed in 1854 and designed to transport coal from the semi-bituminous fields of Stony Valley, the fifty-four-mile Dauphin & Susquehanna Railroad provided a connection to the Reading Railroad at Auburn and the Northern Central Railroad in Dauphin, five miles above Harrisburg. The Dauphin & Susquehanna also ran two passenger trains daily each way during the summer, and one in the winter. Owing to the poor quality of the coal, the railroad teetered on the brink of bankruptcy until 1859, when it was reorganized as the Schuylkill & Susquehanna Railroad. Thirteen years later, the S&S, as it was known locally, became a division of the much larger (and more successful) Philadelphia & Reading Railroad.

By this time, the mining village of Yellow Springs had already been in steady decline for a few decades and had turned into little more than a lumber camp. About six and a half miles down the line the once-thriving mining town of Rausch Gap-- which once boasted a population of over a thousand-- was enduring a similar fate. Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle, stood the village of Cold Spring, which was once the site of a renowned summer resort. The lake that once stood here was created by Kitzmiller's Dam, and it was near this spot where a German immigrant family named Kohr lived during the late 19th century.

On the hot summer afternoon of August 20, 1878, a Philadelphia & Reading train bound for Pottsville was running along the stretch of track below the village of Yellow Springs at a rate of thirty miles an hour. The train had just rounded a curve when the engineer encountered a sight that made his heart skip-- there was was a young boy on the tracks just a few yards ahead, walking directly toward the train with his head down. When the locomotive's whistle failed to attract the attention of the juvenile trackwalker, the engineer tried desperately to bring the train to a halt. But it was too late.

The train's cowcatcher struck the youth midway between his knees and ankles, launching him through the air. When the train finally stopped and the engineer got out, he was approached by another boy, this one a little older, clutching a basket of blackberries. With deep concern and a hoarse voice the older boy asked the engineer if he had seen his little brother. The engineer's face grew pale as the boy told him how he had become separated from his deaf younger brother while picking berries in the mountains. Even though he was fully aware that it would do no good, he had cried out his little brother's name for so long that his throat was sore.

One can only imagine what the engineer must have felt when he motioned for the boy with the basket of berries to follow him, leading the unaware youngster to a spot in the woods where a brakeman was standing. Next to the brakeman's feet a tiny body was laying, as if asleep, with a coat thrown over its head. The carnage was so disturbing that the brakeman had to cover the child with his own jacket so as to avoid looking at it, but when the brakeman saw the engineer approaching, with a second boy following on his heel, he knew what had to be done.

"Is this your brother?" the brakeman managed to ask, lifting the coat from the child's face. The boy dropped his basket, let out a wild shriek, and took off running toward home. The train's crew carried the corpse all the way to Kitzmiller's Dam, following the trail of whimpering sobs still hanging in the air. When Mrs. Kohn saw the engineer and brakeman approaching her home with a bundle in their arms, she fell to her knees and wept.

The August 21, 1878, edition of the Harrisburg Telegraph reported:

The dead body was horribly mangled. The face was battered almost beyond recognition, and the body was frightfully bruised. The corpse was carried to its late home and when the mother saw it she wept in the most heart-breaking manner. Her shrieks were hears by parties distant almost a mile from the house. The unfortunate boy, it seems, was both deaf and dumb, and to keep the sun out of his eyes he had pulled his hat down low. The whistle of the engine he could not hear, and with his eyes on the ground he walked into the jaws of death.

Although three headstones remain, Rausch Gap Cemetery was the site of many burials.

The boy's first name was never provided by the handful of newspapers that printed the story, and there is no mention of where the poor child was laid to rest. It's possible that he could've been buried in one of the many unmarked graves at the nearby Rausch Gap Cemetery, where only three headstones still stand, or at the Moonshine Church Cemetery a short distance to the south, where many generations of Kohrs are buried.