Forest Feeley Carle

Forest Feeley Carle was born June 12, 1894 in Businessburg, Ohio. At the age of 4 he moved with his family to Kansas, where within days his father passed away. His mother remarried when he was 6 to his father's widowed brother-in-law, David Gillaspie. They lived in Emporia. According to his brother Will's boyhood best friend, Albert Stolfus, when Forest was a teenager, he used to hop a train home for lunch each day. Newspaper accounts show that at 12:45 on April 26, 1909, while grabbing the ladder on a south-bound Katy freight train car, just south of 9th Street, the speed of the train jerked the ladder out of his hand and he fell. Two wheels passed over his left leg, crushing it. An ambulance was called, but it took almost an hour to get him to the hospital. His leg was so badly crushed it had to be amputated above the knee. He was in critical condition until he died two days later, April 28, 1909, of hemorrhage and shock. He was 14, and never knew what happened. Forest is buried with his mother in Emporia's Maplewood/Memorial Cemetery.