On Memorial Day 1947, Eastern Airlines Flight 605 Crashed Near Port Deposit

Sixty-two years ago on a gorgeous Memorial Day, a DC-4 with 53-people on board suddenly plunged from the sky into a thick woods outside Port Deposit, MD. With about an hour of daylight remaining Eastern Airlines Flight 605 departed La Guardia on time for its scheduled trip to Miami. As the southbound craft neared the Susquehanna River, Bainbridge and Port Deposit coming into view, everything seemed perfectly normal on this serene afternoon. A DC-3 with a group of Civil Aeronautics Board Investigators (CAB) trailed about three miles behind Flight 605. They too were enjoying the afternoon as the sunlight faded. They were returning from probing the crash of another DC-4 at La Guardia the day before.

With the tranquil scene and the daylight fading, the CAB staffers were taking in the view. But suddenly they were jolted out of this peaceful tranquility by the frightening action of the craft just ahead of them. It was streaking earthward in a vertical dive. Losing altitude quickly, the plane kept dropping and it appeared that no attempt was being made to pull it out of the steep, rapid, out of control descent. Then there was a puff of white smoke, a flash of orange, and billowing cloud of smoke.

After circling the scene, the federal men landed at Aberdeen Proving Ground and commanded ground transportation to the scene to start another fatal investigation. Everyone on board had died in the terrible explosion. Fire companies from Perryville, Port Deposit (Water Witch) and Havre De Grace, along with police officers and men from the Bainbridge Naval Training Center, rushed to the scene, but there was nothing they could do. The crash occurred in a dense, thicket of woods and vines near the north end of Principio roads, not too far from Bainbridge.

Chief Walker of the Havre De Grace Police Department was the first officer to reach the scene according to the Havre de Grace Record. Hurriedly covering the few miles from town to the scene, he told the Record that he was guided to the area by a plane which kept circling above the area. It was later determined this was the craft carrying the CAB officials from the accident at La Guardia which also took a huge toll of lives. “I left officers Bullock and Himes to drive to the scene of the accident while I made my way through the woods on foot. I’ll never forget the horror of that first glimpse I received when I entered the clearing . . . The tangled wreckage of the airliner was a blazing inferno and I realized that all of the passengers must surely be dead.”

According to Aviation Week, the accident was tagged as a mystery. No evidence was found on the structural cause of the crash and in those days recording devices were not yet in use. This is one of the few “for reasons unknown” crashes in the history of U.S. air accidents and the investigation still has experts puzzled all these decades later.

Emergency response personnel working at the scene of the 1947 crash.

The CAB issued its report the following year and here’s a link to that archived document.

The Polk Directory: The Village of Pilot in 1908-09

For a large portion of the 19th and 20th century, directories that provided travelers, business-people, and others with needed information about distance places were published. The ones called gazetteers (geographical dictionaries) described towns, villages, counties, rivers and other natural features. Depending on the amount of content in one of these interesting works you may find information on population, the types of businesses and institutions in the community, the different religious denominations, and public works in the area. State directories usually contained much more information for these publications were similar to the city directories that started getting published once telephones became common place. The names of all the merchants, farmers, manufacturers, mechanics and officials in a community, as well as a full description of the town, village or hamlet are usually found.  To give you some idea of the matter contained in these directories, I scanned a part of a page from the R. L. Polk & Co’s Peninsula Director of the Eastern Shore of Maryland for 1908 -09

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Pilot

This entry is for the village of Pilot located in northwestern Cecil County, near Conowingo and Bald Friar. Twenty-five miles from Elkton and nine miles from Rising Sun, the directory reported that Pilot had a population of 200 people. It also had a dressmaker, grocer, blacksmith, and a couple of carpenters and poultry-men. The directory also lists the farmers in the area.

This Pilot postcard was mailed from the Conowingo Post Office in 1912

Video on Robert F. Kennedy’s Funeral Train

On the 40th anniversary of the passage of RFK’s Funeral train down the northeast corridor, through Cecil County, we posted a piece on some recollections of that sad day as many Cecil Countains stood along the tracks to honor the fallen leader.  A few days ago, a documentary producer reported that they are looking for people that were there that summer day.   That caused us to go over to You Tube where there’s a video showing some of the scenes on that day in 1968 and we thought readers of this blog might enjoy seeing this excellent piece of video work.

Cecil Observer: Spanish Flu Epedemic Killed More Than 150 in Cecil County

The newest area blogger, the Cecil County Observer, has published an interesting historical piece on the an earlier flu Epedemic in Cecil County.  We’re clipping the introduction here.  Click on the link at the bottom of this post to go to the full piece.

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Flu fears are beginning to subside in Cecil County and surrounding areas as the so-called H1N1 virus or “swine flu” shows itself to be less deadly than when it surfaced in Mexico.

Yet flu remains something to take seriously, officials warn, especially when the historical record indicates that the world is overdue for a dangerous pandemic. The Spanish flu that struck worldwide in 1918-19 is often cited as the deadliest outbreak of the disease in modern times. An estimated 20 million to 50 million people died of the flu or complications such as pneumonia.

Even rural Cecil County was affected, with Spanish flu hitting hardest in the fall of 1918 into early 1919. All told, the Spanish flu or the pneumonia that was a secondary infection killed 157 Cecil County residents.

According to an article by Greg Birney in the Fall 2003 Cecil Historical Journal, Spanish flu became so rampant that the Cecil County Board of Health ordered all public gatherings suspended. Schools around the county, including West Nottingham Academy, were closed. Nearby Delaware College (now the University of Delaware) was turned into a hospital, according to Birney, with 135 cases of flu among the 425 students. (Interestingly, several cases of the most recent flu were reported at UD.)

Article Continues on Cecil Observer