This poem and the song that follows are about the train that washed off a railroad bridge in Belmont, North Carolina – the result of a catastrophic flood that happened over one hundred years ago – on July 17, 1916.

I heard about this devastating flood and the train plunging into the river and thought it might make a good song. So I decided to learn all about it. I nearly went blind reading the 100 year old Charlotte Observers in the Carolina Room at the public library. The bottom right hand corner of the pages had disintegrated before being preserved on microfiche from people reading the physical paper. The story about this devastating flood even knocked WW1 off the front pages of the paper. I visited the Catawba Indian Reservation that had been wiped out by the flood. I went to the accident site looking for the train, and found even more stories.

This flood, whose waters rose as high as 50 feet above the normal river level washed out all but one of the highway and railroad bridges along the Catawba River. In an attempt to save the Belmont railway bridge, officials positioning train cars loaded with coal on the tracks directly over the river. They miscalculated. The flood washed the train off the bridge and into the river. Scores of railway workers and onlookers died at the site that day. Today, when the river is low, boaters still run into the train that  lies on the river floor.

Using the poem I wrote about the incident, David Childers, a musical icon, wrote and recorded a song commemorating the event. The song called Belmont Ford and is on his album Run, Skeleton, Run. Stay tuned, the song will play immediately after my reading of the poem.