The Death of Frederick E. Woodbury

On Wednesday, 21 Jan 1914, the mining engineer and executive Frederick E. Woodbury (b. 1862) was killed in an accident inside the Newport Mine in Ironwood, Michigan.

“Mr. Woodbury was almost instantly killed,” the Calumet News reported the next day. “He was inspecting a shaft at the Newport mine in company with General Manager E. L. Cullen and Capt. Grigg, and was in the ladderway looking up the shaft. He did not notice the skip approaching from below and was caught between the skip and the steel set.”

The Grand Rapids Press was blunt: “It is said he looked down the shaft and the descending skip cut his head in two.” (So was the skip moving up or down? Does that matter?)

The Milwaukee Journal carried the sad news on the day of the accident. It identified Woodbury as “general manager of the iron, coke, gas and turpentine interests of Ferdinand Schlesinger,” a company in that city, and went on:

Mr. Woodbury was about 50. [Born in April 1862, he was 51.] He was a mining engineer, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly with the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. Twelve years ago he became mine manager at the Newport Mining Co. About eight years ago he was transferred to Milwaukee as consulting expert, and later made vice president of the company.

Colleagues were shocked and saddened. “He was a man of splended attainments in his profession,” said A. A. Schlesinger, an executive at Woodbury’s employer.

Woodbury left behind a widow. The Milwaukee Journal stated: “Mrs. Woodbury has been living in California because of her health, while Mr. Woodbury made his home in the Milwaukee club. They had no children.”

Woodbury’s body came back to the city on 22 January, said that day’s Milwaukee Daily News. “Arrangements for the funeral will not be made until Mrs. Woodbury arrives here from California.” Two days later the same paper said the widow had been “spending the winter” in California and was due to arrive the next day.

On 5 October, the Duluth News Tribune reported that H. J. Schlesinger and E. L. Cullen, the manager with Woodbury when he was killed, had established a scholarship in geology and mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin in his memory. The first recipient was the son of a man working in the Ironwood mines.

The photo of Woodbury above comes from a profile in Tom Stout’s Montana, Its Story and Biography (1921). That book reprinted an obituary which first appeared in the May 1914 issue of the Bulletin of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, overrunning with praise:

His character was marked by a most unusual blending of gentleness and strength. The world needs such men and his untimely loss is a great one; still he lived much and well, in the best sense, in his allotted time. He did much more both professional and personally for his generation than is given to most men to accomplish in many more years. . . .

He was a hero whose glory was not diminished by intimate association. His capacity for work was enormous and he worked untiringly. In character and achievement he was one of the great, good, noble men of our time.

Woodbury’s father had headed the Great Falls Mining Works in Montana for decades; unusually, his sister Cerula had taken over the leadership of the family company as their father aged. I suspect this article came from her rather than his widow, mentioned in only one line.

TOMORROW: The widow Woodbury.