Canonsburg is an old town. It is more than one hundred years since the place was incorporated into a borough, and it is not far from one hundred and fifty years since colonel John Canon founded the town. Yet in all her long history she never saw so dark a day as this – Tuesday, August 29 – the day on which a majority of the victims of the Opera House tragedy were laid to rest. Not only was it a dark day with sorrow and sadness, but it was a day of literal darkness and gloom. Nature, as though keeping with the occasion, wrapt herself in darkness and wept with the people of the community, it was eminently fitting that it should be so, for is there not something like mockery in Nature arraying herself in her lightest and gayest robes, and wreathing her face in smiles when man is engaged in laying his dead in the cold, dark earth?
Canonsburg has seen days of gloom, and many of them, during her long history, but never a day like this. During the days of the civil war, when the boys marched proudly away to the wild, grand music of war, there was sorrow, and plenty of it; and when after the great battles word came that some had answered the last roll-call there was a gloom over the community. Then, too, in the days after the war, when Cook’s brigade fell and killed and wounded a number of prominent and popular citizens the community was shocked. And last, but not least, there was the dreadful accident in the Hazel mine in March of the present year, which snuffed out in a moment the lives of nine men as quickly as one would snuff out a candle with one’s thumb and finger, causing a thrill of horror to pass through every sensitive and sympathetic heart, and the day on which seven of the victims were buried was a dark day in the good old town.
But none of the horrors we have mentioned were so truly horrible as the Opera House horror of August 26, 1911. This is true certainly because of the numbers which lost their lives; and it is also true because of the fact that so many of the victims were little children – mere buds of humanity, whose lives had but begun; and nearly all were young people – persons whom there was reason to believe had many years of usefulness before them. There is much truth in the old saying: “The young may die, but the old must.” That is we say according to the order of Nature. But in the Opera House horror the order of Nature was reversed, and it was the young who died, while the old lived. Today we have a community bowed in grief, for this disaster has brought the people closer together, and large numbers are obeying the divine injunction to weep with those who weep. The community mourns – mourns like Rachael of old, for her children and refuses to be comforted because they are not. May the kind Heavenly Father be very near to all who have lost near and dear ones, and may this great calamity result in greater and more efficient safeguards being provided for the living.