Wreckage of Plane in which Four Persons Were Killed in Bland County Tuesday
Sheriff W.M. Price Inspects the Battered Cabin Which Held the Victims
From the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Thursday, September 21, 1950.
Wreckage of Plane in which Four Persons Were Killed in Bland County Tuesday
Sheriff W.M. Price Inspects the Battered Cabin Which Held the Victims
MECHANICSBURG, VA., Sept. 20 — (AP) — Investigations started at daybreak today to determine what caused a single-engine plane to crash in a muddy meadow in Bland County yesterday, killing four persons.
Meanwhile, at De Kalb, Ill., relatives made funeral plans for the four victims whose bodies were shipped from a Wytheville funeral home tonight.
W.M. Price, Bland County sheriff, said a Civil Aeronautics Board official went to the crash scene near Dismal Mountain to start the investigation.
The CAB official, H.B. Carr, of Washington, was unavailable for comment.
Price said the plane's engine was dug from the soft earth and sent to Roanoke for further study. The rest of the plane was pulled to the house of Esca Mitchell, on whose farm the four-passenger Beechcraft crashed when a landing was attempted.
Relatives of the pilot, William Edgar Clark, 32, telephoned Sheriff Price they would come to Bland from De Kalb to dispose of the plane after the funeral Saturday. A guard was posted near the plane.
Clark and Lymon E. Sebree, 44, were flying Mrs. Jannette Barbara Acers, 32, and her sister, Mrs. Margaret M. Longton, 35, from Raleigh to Chicago, about 55 miles from De Kalb.
At Chicago, the plane was to have been met by Mrs. Longton's husband, Vince, a golf pro at a suburban country club.
The two sisters were the last of a De Kalb family named Rowe. The women's father was a city police chief before he died. The only other member of the family, a son, died unexpectedly last month.
Clark, who leased the De Kalb Municipal Airport, and Sebree, the airport manager, had flown from De Kalb to Raleigh to take the ailing Mrs. Acers from a Raleigh hospital to Illinois.
Mrs. Acers' husband, a Marine Corps Major, is stationed at Cherry Point, N.C.
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