Bostian Bridge

Bostian Bridge is a five-arch granite and brick railroad span, roughly 260 feet long and about 60 feet above Third Creek, two miles west of Statesville in Iredell County. It still carries the Norfolk Southern line between Statesville and Asheville, and it remains private railroad property closed to the public.

Early on August 27, 1891, westbound passenger train No. 9 of the Richmond and Danville system, operating the old Western North Carolina Railroad route, left Statesville about 2:30 a.m., running roughly half an hour late. Minutes later the locomotive and its cars left the rails on the bridge and fell into the creek bed. The Iredell County Public Library's account puts 52 passengers aboard, every one of them injured; NCpedia records 23 dead, while other sources count 22. Some victims drowned in the creek before rescuers from Statesville could reach them. The dead were carried to the Farmers' Tobacco Warehouse for identification, and local photographer William Jasper Stimson made the only known photographs of the scene. The disaster was covered in Frank Leslie's Weekly and the Statesville Landmark.

A coroner's jury convened four days later found that spikes and bolts had been pulled from a rail, apparently with company tools taken from an unlocked shed, but it also condemned rotten crossties, a defective superstructure, and the speed at which trains crossed the bridge. Historian Scott Huffard, writing in Southern Cultures in 2014, describes how the railroad pushed the sabotage theory to limit its liability while local papers blamed neglect. In 1897 two men already in the state penitentiary were convicted of the wrecking on the strength of confessions reported by fellow inmates. The wreck was the deadliest in North Carolina to that date, and the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources marked its 125th anniversary in 2016.