Separated at Three, Reunited at Sixty on a Centralia Train Platform
A famous Boston preacher changing trains in Centralia asks a stranger his name — and finds the brother his family had not heard from in more than fifty years.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
When Rev. Minot J. Savage was in Washington he passed through Centralia on his way to Portland. Standing on the depot platform at Centralia was an elderly gentleman, perhaps 60 years of age. When the great Boston preacher passed by the elderly gentleman, the latter asked him if his name was Savage. The preacher said, "Yes, and you are my brother Charles." "That's what I am," said the latter, and the two embraced. The brothers were separated when Minot J. was three years old and they had never met until that day, nor did any of the Savage family ever hear from Charles, who drifted to the Pacific coast many years ago. He is now clerking in a store at Tenino.
“"Yes, and you are my brother Charles." "That's what I am," said the latter, and the two embraced.”
In 1891 Centralia and Tenino were raw railroad towns on the line running north to Puget Sound, and the depot platform was the one spot every traveler had to pass through. Families broken by westward migration frequently lost contact for good, so a chance reunion like this one was the human counterweight to the era's restless mobility. The same corridor towns are now exits off I-5, still full of people who arrived from somewhere else and stopped writing home.
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