Casey Jones in Cumberland?

Source: Wikipedia.

Railroad engineer John Luther "Cayce" Jones, nicknamed for the Kentucky town where he grew up, died in a wreck in 1900, on the Illinois Central near Vaughan, Miss. Nine years later, a couple of vaudevillians, T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton, commemorated the incident in "Casey Jones," which became one of the most enduring songs in the history of American pop music. It has inspired countless cover versions, variations and imitations -- and a surprising number of claims that the song wasn't about the guy who died in Mississippi.

Norm Cohen's monumental Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (2nd ed.; Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000) devotes a 25-page chapter to "Casey Jones," documenting "handfuls of accounts identifying the Casey Jones of the song with numerous different railroad engineers on as many different railroad lines" (141).

John Luther "Cayce" Jones. Source: Wikipedia.

For example, Cohen notes that on Aug. 1, 1911, the Kansas City Star printed four letters responding to an earlier article about the death of Casey Jones. "Each one claimed that a different person, killed in a different accident, was the inspiration for the ballad, and each quoted a different fragment of a ballad to prove it” (137).

One of those letter writers, Cohen writes, "asserted that Casey Jones was killed on the B&O near Cumberland, Maryland, on December 18, 1895. His real name was Cassidy Jones, and his run was from Washington Junction to Connellsville" (139). Cohen quotes the letter further:

There isn't a 'rounder' east of Pittsburgh who doesn't know the lines:

Cassidy, 'twas known all through the gap

Opened the throttle when he took a nap,

And every town knew by the engine's blow

When Cassidy went through on the B&O. (139)

Cohen doesn't identify the letter writer, who may simply have been mistaken, of course. But one does wonder how many engineers named Jones died in wrecks before World War I, and how many of them posthumously had songs written -- or "Casey Jones" rewritten -- in their honor. 

If he existed, and if the song fragment is accurate, Cassidy Jones must have been a dangerous man to put in charge of a locomotive, if he "opened the throttle when he took a nap"! That can't have been standard procedure.

Connellsville is in Fayette County, Pa., not far from the Western Maryland line, and Frederick County, Md., has a Washington Junction. Can some historian of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad confirm the 1895 death of an engineer named Cassidy Jones?