Join us on Thursday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m., at the Cuba Library for a history presentation by St. Bonaventure Professor Chris Dalton and others. Over the past few months, the St. Bonaventure University History Department and its students, in coordination with the Cuba Circulating Library and some of the community’s local historians, have pursued a project to understand how historic events on a national scale are able to reflect the life and times of people at more localized level.

In the Cuba Cemetery stands an obelisk which memorializes the life and tragic death of Hiram Chamberlain, who perished in the Ashtabula Railway Disaster on a blizzardy evening on Dec. 29th, 1876. This calamity, now a distant memory of the hazards of early train travel, once occupied the attention of our entire nation. Even now, the collapse of the Ashtabula Bridge and the plummeting of the Lake Shore & Michigan passenger train to the bottom of the gulch remains one of the deadliest train accidents in American history.

This project has been funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.