Helen Smoot rests beside her sister, Anna, in a grave marked by an oblong, blue-gray stone, atop a pastoral hill in East Texas.  I stopped there one restless afternoon 22 years ago, curious about the age of the cemetery, and couldn’t help but pause a moment at the Smoot sisters’ plot.  Helen was 17 and Anna was 15 when they died on the same day in 1937.  “Together in the sunshine, together in the rain,” is inscribed in the granite marker.  What a tragedy, I thought, to lose two children at once.

As the father of two daughters born, like Helen and Anna, two years apart, I wondered how any parent could even begin to cope with such an enormous loss.

Near the sisters, another gravestone has colorful toy marbles imbedded in the concrete footer that spell the last name Payne.  Here rests Lewis, born Sept 27, 1921, died March 18, 1937.  Another tombstone, white beneath seeping gray stains, stands nearby James W. Harris, born June 19, 1924, died March 18, 1937.  Across from it, one for Virginia Allen Loe, born January 5, 1924, died March 18, 1937.

Gazing across the cemetery, I saw other tombstones—scores of them, mostly children—sharing the same date of death:  March 18, 1937.

I wandered through the hilltop graveyard, stunned.  Inscriptions on the markers offered hints of a catastrophe:  “Victim of the explosion,” “London School Tragedy,” “Victims of the New London, Texas School Disaster.”  I had been living in East Texas for a couple of years and had heard bits and pieces about a calamity at a school in the 1930s during the Great Depression, but it didn’t register as anything I’d read about in history books.  I had been a journalist and professional writer since 1970, and I didn’t recall any anniversary news stories or articles about the disaster.  Quite by accident I was standing in the place, Pleasant Hill Cemetery, where 110 of the students, teachers and visitors—about a third of the victims of the explosion—were buried.
This book found its genesis in that graveyard.  During the next two decades, I unearthed the story of the afternoon a town lost its future.

~ David M. Brown 



Trailer produced by B.J. Gudmundsson, Pathwork Films
Music performed by dhruva'; copyright 2003; songwriter; S.D. Stephenson; publisher, Harmony Grove Studios