Chris Dalton Presented at Cuba Circulating Library

Professor Chris Dalton presented "Early Rail Travel: How National Events Affect Local Life" at the Cuba Circulating Library on March 30. A crowd of 38 attended to hear about the work his students did on the local connection to a national disaster. Professor Dalton and his students enrolled in History 300: Historical Methods and Historiography worked with the Cuba Circulating Library and local historians. According to the Cuba Circulating Library web page: "Over the past few months, the St. Bonaventure University History Department and its students, in coordination with the Cuba Circulating Library and some of the community’s local historians, have pursued a project to understand how historic events on a national scale are able to reflect the life and times of people at more localized level."

The project originated with a tour of the Cuba Cemetery. Again, from the Cuba Circulating Library web page: "In the Cuba Cemetery 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 Dec. 29th, 1876. This calamity, now a distant memory of the hazards of early train travel, once occupied the attention of our entire nation. Even now, 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 project made use of local historical newspapers that have been digitized, examining the impact of a distant tragedy on the nation but also on Cuba residents. Students could see the increased interconnection created by newspapers and railroads.

The project was funded by a Connections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.