| History: | The Livingston Lumber Company operated a tram road in it support of its mill at Buck (Zimmerman), two miles north of Livingston. Keeling noted that one geared and four rod locomtoives operated on the ten-mile track. The logging tram operation employed a locomotive named the “Old One Hundred.”
The Polk County Enterprise reported in 1908 that a tramroad wreck on August 6, 1908, killed five and injured four. According to the writer, “This was the worst wreck that has ever happened in East Texas.” The engine, pulling eight logging cars at a speed of fifty miles per hours, hit a cow, derailed, and plowed ahead for one hundred yards into a small trestle bridge, tearing up the tracks and destroying the bridge. The locomotive landed in the bed, throwing debris in all directions.
E. B. Rice, a white night watchman at the Front, was slightly injured. He pulled Finnis Peebles out from the engine cab, then Brack Hickman, a white sawyer, who died two days later. Peebles, a white commissary clerk, somehow walked a half mile to his aunt's house, where he collapsed and died. Rice was unable to get to Fayette Rogers, a teamster, and Watson Scott, the engineer, “who were both wedged and jammed under the cab of the engine.” Rice heard Rogers and Scott, both African-Americans, pleading for help as they were scalded to death from the steaming water “pouring in on them from the engine, . .”. Henry Young, an African-American brakeman, also died. The injured included, besides Rice, Rice's nephew, Charlie Clark, who suffered bruises and a broken collar bone; and two other African-Americans, Sam Sipp with a bruised and cut lip, and Wise Carter, a fireman, with scald burns.
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