Wildwood walks and tragic rocks

Fatalities at Flaherty's Crossing Pt. 1

Lately, I’ve been hanging out at a new (to me) cemetery in Amherst: Wildwood Cemetery. True to the name, it’s in a beautiful wooded setting.

Wildwood Cemetery. Amherst, Massachusetts.

I haven’t visited Wildwood much since I moved to Amherst because I thought leashed dogs weren’t allowed there and my cemetery walking time overlaps heavily with my dog walking time.

My dog Maggie (right) walking with her friend, Sebastian, at East View Cemetery in Atlanta

Now that I know Maggie is allowed to visit the cemetery with me, we’re having a lot of fun exploring it just like we did West Cemetery in Amherst when I was working on my women’s history walk there over the winter.

Lots of rocks

Wildwood Cemetery was established more recently than West Cemetery (1887 vs. 1730), and it doesn’t have the same rich collection of Colonial and Victorian monuments. What Wildwood does have, though, is a number gravestones that are large, naturally cut rocks. For example, here’s the grave of Austin Dickinson, the brother of poet Emily Dickinson, and a major force behind the establishment of Wildwood:

Austin Dickinson’s grave at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, MA.

I’m finding myself drawn to these rocks on my walks, and most recently, I came across one for Horton Grant, a student at Amherst College who died in 1944 at age eighteen.

Horace Grant's grave at Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, MA.

Given that Grant’s death occurred during World War II, my first thought was that he had died in combat; however, a newspaper search revealed he was the victim of a tragic car accident that occurred at Flaherty’s Crossing in Hadley.

At this crossing, cars had to navigate a narrow, curved underpass beneath the railroad tracks. The night of Horton Grant’s passing, he was one of nine students riding in a car that was traveling from a private party in Amherst to Smith College in Northampton. The female passengers in the car were due back in their dorms at 10:15pm. The accident occurred at 10:10pm when the car slammed into one of the stone abutments at the crossing.

Horton Grant was one of four killed, two men and two women.

Where was Flaherty’s Crossing?

Even though I regularly drive between Amherst and Northampton, I’m not familiar with an area called Flaherty’s Crossing nor did anything come up when I searched for it Google Maps. Instead, I turned to newspapers.com and searched for the term “Flaherty’s Crossing” in Massachusetts newspapers to see when the location first appeared in the papers and the last time it was cited. What I discovered, and what I’ll share in the coming weeks, is that the dangerous history of this crossing spanned decades.

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