A Memorial Day Remembrance

By Peter Crane, MWOBS Curator

As we are about to commence the Memorial Day weekend, we should take time to recall four of “our own”, previous weather observers on Mount Washington, soldiers who gave their lives in the service of their country.

Three of the fallen were members of the U.S. Army Signal Service, early occupiers of the summit for scientific purposes. One was a member of the founding crew of the Observatory.

On February 26, 1872, Private William Stevens died of an apparent stroke while on duty at the summit. His single shift mate, Sgt. Martin Hearne, kept watch with the body until further assistance could ascend from the valley.

On July 2, 1873, Private Willam Seely, a member of the Signal Service crew at the summit, died in Littleton of injuries he had received in the crash of a slideboard (aka “The Devil’s Shingle”) on the Cog Railway. He had suffered those injuries while descending the mountain a few days earlier, on June 28.

In 1884, Sgt. Winfield Scott Jewell was one of the many members of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (also known as the Greely Expedition) to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic who succumbed to starvation and disease. Of the twenty-five men of that official Army expedition, only seven survived. Jewell, a native of Lisbon, New Hampshire, had served at the Signal Service weather station on the summit in 1878 and 1879. The Jewell Trail on the western slope of the mountain is named in his memory (and the naming of that trail was suggested by Bob Monahan, of the Observatory’s founding crew).

On April 30, 1944, Major Salvatore Pagliuca of the U.S. Army Air Force died as a result of injuries suffered in a jeep accident on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina. He was on the first crew of the Observatory in 1932, and was present at the world record wind on April 12, 1934. He had been born in Naples, Italy, an immigrant who died in the service of his adopted country.

On this Memorial Day, let us remember these former observers. “All gave some, some gave all.”