Stewart, the railroad president, was among the victims burned to death in the end car, along with Lobdell, the editor, and the Fullers of Spartansburg.

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The honeymooning Kents died together. The wedding band that Granger had presented his bride—inscribed with her initials, still legible on the gold—survived the flames. Their bodies were identified, more than a week later, by the luggage claim tickets found on their remains.

As for the trio of friends from Erie—Towner, Martin and Metcalf—they had taken seats together, and all three were burned to the point of disfigurement. Towner was identified and claimed by his brother, brother-in-law and a doctor who came from Erie to recover his remains. Metcalf’s body was returned to his family and friends in Erie on Christmas Day. “The body of C.T. [sic] Metcalf, of Erie, Penn., had been recognized among the burned carcasses by a tooth on the left side of the mouth lapping over to the right,” reported The New York Times on December 21.

Martin, on the other hand, was so badly charred that he was placed into a wooden case at the scene, along with other remains, for sorting and identification. Some time later, at the Soldiers’ Rest Home in Buffalo, Martin’s friends were at last able to identify what they hoped was his body; they took it away with them.

Darkness fell quickly over the smoking scene of the wreckage, as villagers tended to the victims. Supervising this effort was Dr. Romaine J. Curtiss, Angola’s talented physician and, until teams of backup doctors arrived later that night from Buffalo, the chief caretaker of the train’s wounded. Curtiss, 27, who had served as a Union hospital ship surgeon during the Civil War, checked over the bodies of the burnt, dispatched the badly wounded to nearby homes and treated those suffering from shock and lesser injuries.

At the residence of Josiah Southwick, “persons were lying in beds and upon the floor, in almost every room in the house, and not only Mr. Southwick’s family, but a number of the neighbors…were kindly and most patiently doing all in their power to assuage their pain and make them comfortable,” noted The New York Times on the 21st. Indeed, the villagers of Angola received much praise in the press for their quick and determined response to the tragedy.

The bodies of the dead were carried to the Angola depot. There they were boxed, sometimes two or three to a casket, and sent by funeral train to Buffalo. The Soldiers’ Rest Home, the Tifft House and the National Hotel all served as temporary morgues where relatives and authorities could view them. “A large number of people lined the walks while the bodies were being carried out of the depot, and a most respectful silence was preserved,” reported The New York Times.

Zachariah Hubbard, a carpenter from Port Dalhousie, Ontario, was among those taken to the Soldiers’ Home. A passenger in the end car, Hubbard had died two hours after he was pulled from the wreck, his upper torso intact and uninjured, the entire lower half of his body burned “to ash.” Later, his ring of keys was found in the wreckage and reunited with his body.

A memorial service for all the victims took place inside Buffalo’s Exchange Street depot three days before Christmas, on December 22. During the service, the choirs of the city’s churches came together to sing a hymn—“I would not live alway,” taken from the Book of Job—that resounded mightily off the cavernous ceilings of the depot, under which 19 plain wooden boxes lay in neat rows.

Afterwards, the boxes were buried in Forest Lawn, a rolling, lushly treed cemetery on the edge of Buffalo. Railroad officials claimed 19 people lay in the boxes; passenger lists, had they been kept, would have indicated that far more unidentified and unclaimed victims presumably lay in the coffins as well. Cemetery records hedged on this point, and listed only two names for the 19 burial spaces, probably feeling less than confident about the accuracy of the identifications.

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