My great-great aunt Marjorie Tyte was on the Shelter Island Express train that crashed into the Golden Pickle Factory on Aug. 13, 1926.
It’s a story that’s been handed down through my family with such tumbled edges that it has blurred into my childhood recollections, in the soup of yarns spun out by my father and his father before him (including suspicious tales of Cary Grant picking up young Hallock Young as he hitchhiked home to Riverhead on leave from the Navy, or of Albert Einstein explaining spooky action at a distance to him at the counter of the Cutchogue Diner).
It’s a story that would have matched the intensity of my grandmother’s decision to not continue nursing school after caring for the victims of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in a Boston emergency room, had Great Aunt Marjorie been willing or able to spill the beans. Acting, grandma decided, would be a far less dramatic career.
My father isn’t quite as much of a Big Fish spinner as his father was, and he loved his Great Aunt Marjorie dearly. It always gave him solace that she was in one of the rear cars of the train that day, far from the Pullman up front where the “upper crust passengers” bore the brunt of the crash.
“I don’t understand what’s so “great” about the Great Calverton Pickle Factory Train Wreck,” he said when pressed for details this week. He used to read poetry about the pickle wreck at the Osborn Inn, before it became Bagel Lovers, and before he moved to North Carolina. I have to believe that he knows things.
There were 387 passengers on the train that day, and what Great Aunt Marjorie — a 34-year-old farm girl from Calverton — was doing on an express train from Jamaica to Greenport, we don’t know. She didn’t tell, or no one asked, and now it’s too late.
What we know we pieced together from the newspapers of the time. The Great Calverton Pickle Factory Train Wreck, in which six people died, made the front page of the New York Times.
The Shelter Island Express was a Friday afternoon train taking city folk out east for the weekend — back when the Long Island Rail Road still thought the North Fork warranted its own “Cannonball.”
Pulled by two steam locomotives, the train left Jamaica at 4:28 p.m., with stops in Babylon, Riverhead and Greenport. According to the New York Times, the train was 17 minutes late and traveling at a high rate of speed when it reached a faulty switch in Calverton, at a site just west of Edwards Avenue where the Railroad Museum of Long Island is unveiling a William G. Pomeroy Foundation Historic Marker in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
“We had thought something should be at Calverton, at the site, as a memorial, so all the citizens would know this as a place that’s important to our history,” Railroad Museum of Long Island President Don Fisher told the Riverhead Town Board when he announced plans for the historic marker last November.
The first engine derailed upon hitting a faulty switch at about 6:09 p.m., dragging the second engine off the tracks and into the Golden Pickle Factory and overturning the Pullman car and a combination car.
In the five passenger cars behind, people were mostly rattled and hysterical, but up front the scene was carnage.
The engineer and fireman of the first engine, William Squires and John Montgomery of Greenport, were both killed, though the crew of the second engine escaped with bruises.
According to the Times account, in the Pullman car, two children — one-year-old Dorothy Schuford and three-year-old George Schuford, of Biltmore, N.C., were both killed, while their mother, Ms. George A. Schuford, was “pinned in the wreckage of the Pullman car for five hours,” as soldiers and firemen who rushed to the scene from Riverhead freed her and took her to Southampton Hospital with an injury to her leg. Her African-American maid, Laura Conley, was quickly extricated but seriously injured — her leg had to be amputated.
A stockbroker in the Pullman car, Harold Fish, also died in the wreck, along with a man who was unidentified as of the press time. Mr. Fish, reportedly, was on his way to “Marion, near Greenport,” to join his wife and daughters for dinner.
Injuries were also documented among workers, including an employee of the Golden Pickle Factory, who was hurt by a falling barrel of pickles, and a track worker who was standing near the switch when the train derailed. In all, 15 were reported hurt that day.
Aunt Marjorie was a quiet homemaker. She married a hellion who cruised around Riverhead in a Volkswagen Beetle. She was my great-grandfather Franklin’s older sister, a homemaker who cared for her father, Linn, in his old age.
When my father was a kid, he would visit his grandfather’s rambling old farmhouse on the north side of Sound Avenue, where he would play quietly with wooden blocks while Linn slept and Aunt Marjorie readied lunch in the kitchen. Linn’s mantle clock, which she kept ticking, is in my garage in Flanders with her care instructions inside, neatly written in blue ink.
Linn died with a smile on his face as Marjorie was driving him home from the polls in 1960. Everyone thinks he voted for Nixon.
Marjorie died in 1978, the year I was born, at the age of 86. She’s buried in the Riverhead Cemetery between Roanoke Avenue and the Pulaski Street School. When I was a kid, after we fed the ducks in Merritts Pond, we’d walk the stone wall of that cemetery along Roanoke Avenue, from our apartment above the Pine Tree Nursery School to the corner store at Pulaski Street (aka the Peppermint Patty Store) every day for treats. I don’t remember the name of the place, but I know a lot of you out there do.
And I still think of the Great Calverton Pickle Disaster every time I hear that urgent fire whistle blow. The hard parts of our history are a part of all of us, whether we know it or not.
“First responders from Riverhead, and several hundred servicemen from Camp Upton worked to get people out of wreck,” Don Fisher, of the Railroad Museum, told the Riverhead Town Board last November. “It changed the face of Calverton. It was tragic, but a part of the history of our town.”
Editor’s note: This article was published on Aug. 13, 2026
Keep Independent News on the East End
The Beacon is able to provide all of our content online free of charge thanks to support from our readers. Be a vital part of keeping our community informed!
Advertisement
Hi Beth,
A neighbor of mine told me a story about a train wreck in Riverhead when he was a child . It must be the same one?
I remember him mentioning how there was salt all over the place. And I had construed perhaps mistakenly, that it was a trainload of salt.
I wonder if this was the same incident and the train crashed into a barn full of salt for making pickles.
Oh how these stories are told and remembered over time.
Thank you for your reporting .