Civil War Prison Train Wreck at Shohola

On July fifteenth, eighteen sixty-four, an Erie Railroad train carrying eight hundred thirty-three Confederate prisoners of war and one hundred twenty-eight Union guards collided head-on with a coal train near the Delaware River, between the villages of Shohola and Lackawaxen. The crash killed approximately forty-eight prisoners and seventeen guards, making it one of the deadliest railroad disasters of the Civil War era. The wounded and the living were pulled from the wreckage and carried to Shohola, where local residents opened their homes and provided care to men who were technically enemies.

The prisoners were buried together in a cemetery nearby, Confederates and Union soldiers side by side. In the decades that followed, veterans from both sides returned to the site to mark the graves and honor the dead in what became an unlikely gesture of post-war reconciliation.