Death Rides the Rails

from David Parmer

The Story of Wayne Skinner & Roscoe McNemar

Roscoe McNemar and Wayne Skinner were first cousins and grew up together in Orlando. Where you would find one of the boys you generally would find the other. The two boys had something else in common as well: they both were enchanted with the railroads which crossed in their hometown.

Before the days of airplanes and video games many youth of our country were fascinated by trains. As a boy growing up in Burnsville I idled a great deal of time watching the trains clank through Burnsville, counting the number of cars and looking for the unusual logos on the cars such as “Lake Erie and Pittsburgh”, or perhaps the “Nickel Plate Road”. A cereal company in the 1950s put railroad logos in their boxes of breakfast cereals as an inducement for parents to buy that particular brand for their railroad crazy children. I eagerly opened each box. Boys would also walk the tracks, heads down, looking for the strips of lead, left over from the torpedo flares, which were the line sinkers of choice for many a Burnsville boy who decided to go ‘a-fishin’.

There were other fascinating sights on the railroad line. There were steam engines, and later the diesels, water tanks, signal lights, switches, trestles, hand cars, freight cars, flat cars, depots, passenger cars, box cars, refrigerator cars, coal cars, engineers looking very important high in their perches, conductors hanging on the rear of the cabooses, track gangs laboring in the sun and many other aspects of the rail industry to fascinate youthful fancies.

Some youths carried their fancies a little too far and sought adventure by riding the rails and hopping freight cars. These ‘Huck Finns’ of the rails often started just by looking into empty cars or sitting on flat cars that were stopped at the depot or at a water tower. Sometimes the game was carried even further by riding short distances on the cars as they were starting to move and then jumping off. Emboldened by minor successes in the game some boys took the next step and fancied themselves as ‘hobos’ of the rails by taking ticket-less trips on the train to the next town. Such adventures often led to tragedy. Such was the fate of Wayne Skinner and Roscoe McNemar.

Wayne's father Charles Skinner, born in 1867, was a farmer, miller and a storekeeper, the son of Perry S. Skinner and Emily Posey Skinner. Charles was a grandson of Alexander and Phebe (Conrad) Skinner. Charles married Margaret “Maggie” Cosner. Maggie's folks were Abraham and Mary Elizabeth (Roby) Cosner, who came from Hardy County to settle in Lewis County.

The Charles and Maggie (Cosner) Skinner family of Orlando was the typical Orlando family of the early 1900s. There were five boys in the Skinner family. The oldest boy, George Wesley, born in 1890, had died in California in a motorcycle accident in 1913.

Right: Lee, Ethel (in front), a friend (unknown), another friend (unknown), Charles Skinner, Necie, Wes (standing behind), Burt and Frank on Maggie's lap. Wayne and Nora were not born yet when this photo was taken.

Alfred Lee, known as “Lee”,1 was born in 1892, Clarence who went by “Burt” was born in 1896, Sylvester Frank, who understandably went by his middle name of “Frank”, was the fourth son and was born in 1902, and the youngest boy of the family, Wayne, was born in 1907. The three girls of Charles and Maggie Skinner were Necie who was born in 1893, Ethel born in 1895 and the youngest child of the family, Nora, was born in 1911.

Mary Skinner, a sister of Charles Skinner, was 27 when she married David McNemar, almost 30 years her senior, when they wed around 1900. Mary and David were the parents of three children, a daughter Vergie, and two sons Alpha “Ed” and Roscoe, the latter of whom was the youngest, born in 1907.


Roscoe's mom, Mary (Skinner) McNemar is on the left .

Roscoe McNemar and Wayne Skinner were first cousins and grew up together in Orlando. Where you would find one of the boys you generally would find the other. The two boys had something else in common as well: they both were enchanted with the railroads which crossed in their hometown. As all the older citizens of Orlando will recall, it was difficult to get to other places in the early 1900s. There were no automobiles, roads were little more than cow paths, and there was too much work to do to even think about going somewhere other than church on Sunday. But then the railroads came to Orlando. Now there was a bustling depot, several trains a day crossing in Orlando going north to Buckhannon and Weston and south to Burnsville, Richwood and Charleston. And riding a train was much more comfortable than riding a horse if you had one, and, if you were clever and a risk taker, you could ride for free on the trains by simply hopping a freight and staying out of sight of the conductor. The two boys had previously been warned by the railroads of their freight hopping.

In the summer of 1923, Roscoe McNemar and Wayne Skinner were both 16, and full of vinegar and wanderlust. After a July day of cutting “filth”, the cousins decided a little recreation and adventure would be a cure-all for the aches left over from the day’s labor.

In a re-creation of the day’s events reported in the newspaper of the day, it appears that Roscoe and Wayne hopped a south-bound freight on an early Tuesday evening. The whereabouts of the two boys after hopping the freight was a mystery. No witnesses were found who saw them after leaving Orlando.

Early the next morning at Gilmer Station, a busy little coal tipple town on the Coal and Coke Railroad, about four miles west of Burnsville, a track walker came upon the grisly scene of two mangled and completely severed corpses near a water tank. The authorities of Gilmer County were called to the scene. Sheriff J. H. Hall and Prosecuting Attorney B. W. Craddock secured identification of the two bodies and determined that Roscoe McNemar and Wayne Skinner had met their untimely and terrible fate by riding the rails. The official report determined that it appeared that McNemar and Skinner had been waiting on a north bound freight to stop at the Gilmer Station water tank and were intending to board a freight back to Orlando. The official report surmised that the two boys had gone to sleep on the rail tracks waiting on the 1:15 a.m. north bound freight. The engineer of the freight did not see the boys sleeping on the tracks and was unaware that the train had run over them.

Lee Skinner, older brother of Wayne Skinner, went to Gilmer Station and made the official identification of his sixteen year old brother. It is reported that the bodies were so mangled that it was difficult to reconstruct the body parts which were scattered along the railroad right of way. The severed head of Wayne Skinner was awaiting identification in a five gallon bucket. Lee later related that he reached into the bucket and lifted his brother’s head by the hair to make the identification.

Horrible deaths that occur sometimes cause speculation about the cause of death. Some members of the two families surmised that the two boys had been murdered by persons unknown and that their bodies had been placed on the tracks to be run over by the train in order to cover up the crime. Contrary to that theory, the authorities attributed the deaths as accidental and as the result of two unfortunate youths seeking a thrill by riding the rails.

The grief stricken families buried their sons in the Skinner Cemetery in Orlando.

1 For more on Wayne's brother Lee see the entry in Jan '07, Lee Skinner Rode His Bicycle

Comments
comment 1 from Marilyn (Cole) Posey
My great grandfather William Rufus Blake died on January 22, 1937 from fractured ribs, chest and skull. His daughter (my grandmother) Alta (Blake) Bee, always told me they found her dad on the railroad tracks. She said he had kind of retired from the railroad and was given some kind of gold watch in honor of his retirement. When they found him on the tracks, the only thing missing was the watch. It was never found and she as well as others in that area felt he was murdered simply to have that gold watch. Since he had worked on the railroad they felt it highly unlikely that he would walk on the tracks, lay down etc. as he knew what time the trains came through daily since he had retired from there.

Picture of the railroad retirement pocketwatch is from ebay.