"Someone needs to write a song about this," muttered Orange County (VA) historian Frank Walker as he conducted a motor coach tour of the area. As Frank's tour guide-in-training and occasional musician, I rose to the bait.

The Wreck at the Fat Nancy trestle is tailor made for a disaster genre song. The story begins in the wee hours of July 12, 1888 when a train left the station at Orange, Virginia heading south. A couple of miles from town, it crossed a 190-foot long rickety wooden bridge over an unnamed stream. Named after an obese washerwoman who lived nearby, the Fat Nancy Trestle collapsed that night killing nine people on board. The photograph you see was taken the day after.

This story is rife with ironies:

1) One of the dead was the civil engineer hired to replace the trestle with an earthen berm. He was heading home for a weekend with his family.

2) On board the train that night was Confederate Corps Commander, James Longstreet, coming home from a reunion of Gettysburg veterans. Longstreet had a reputation for showing up late for battles. He figuratively showed up late for this disaster because he was in the last car of the train, the only car not to plunge into the abyss.

3) Another one of the dead was a Confederate Civil War veteran and amputee. Rescuers found a large amount of cash stuffed inside his hollow wooden leg, presumably won in poker games at that same battlefield reunion.

4) Although nine people were killed, ten bodies were found, the tenth being an infant in a casket, heading home for burial.

5) And finally, the ultimate irony... Fat Nancy was just too large to bear her own weight.