W. P. Payne’s company preserved in a Virginia train wreck

In September 1889, a company of Latter-day Saint emigrants under Elder W. P. Payne was traveling by train through Virginia when heavy rains or a cloudburst washed out a bridge. The wreck occurred near Lynchburg; one account places it four miles below Lynchburg and dates it to September 15. The accounts differ on the company’s size (165 Saints in one, 160 in the other) and describe the cars’ positions in differing detail: two cars plunged toward a creek, with one overturned and wrecked and the other left partly ditched or almost perpendicular. Although the accident occurred at midnight in darkness and the cars carried women and children, no one was killed or seriously injured. The fuller account also says an infant missing in the confusion was found alive and safe behind a stove in the wreckage. Payne and others regarded the passengers’ preservation as miraculous.