Calls for Help Nearly Overwhelmed Small Bramanville Telephone Exchange
Thursday, April 24, 1930, was a dark day in the long history of Howe Caverns, Inc. The cave’s chief electrician Owen Wallis and caverns’ corporation secretary John Sagendorf died in the cave under baffling circumstances. They collapsed in the early morning hours near the postcard-worthy formation, “The Bell of Moscow.”
When the two men failed to return that morning, a third was sent into the cave to find why. This 25-year-old tour guide returned alone minutes later, warning of “poisonous gases,” fell out of the elevator, and then collapsed, later recovering in an Albany hospital.
That warning set off a chaotic series of efforts to rescue and revive the men. Those efforts, as well as the investigation and court case that followed, are captured in my April 2024 book, The Cave electrician’s Widow: The Tragedy at Howe Caverns and Dramatic Courtroom Fight for Justice.
The local emergency squads were unequipped to handle the response, and calls for help went out across the region. The news quickly spread.
One of the first to hear of the growing emergency was 37-year-old Elizabeth “Louise” Millspaugh, the operator at the Bramanville Telephone Exchange, operating from the switchboard in her home nearby. Except for the 200-plus subscribers at the 20-year-old telephone exchange, all calls were long distance, and required Louise—her friends called her “Eliza” —to patch forward the desperate calls from the caverns’ lodge to the long-distance operator. There was no guarantee the number would go through; it may take several attempts.
As the news spread, the Bramanville Exchange was deluged with calls from friends and neighbors of Wallis and Sagendorf. “Newspaper men” from the Capital Region and beyond were also calling, and repeatedly, for updates.
They all went through Eliza’s line.
Eliza would have been 37 at the time. With her husband Earl, they purchased the Bramanville Telephone Exchange in 1923 from its founder, Palmer Slingerland, a Town of Cobleskill supervisor and well-known Bramanville business owner.
The switchboard was in her home in the small hamlet (pop. less than a 1,000) on the road to the cave. Eliza not only knew the victims and their families but must have also heard every siren racing by. She could anxiously count the minutes from the time of her call to the time the ambulance passed.
The day began just before the 5 a.m. sunrise when a planned blast at the North American Cement Plant in Howes Cave knocked 60,000 tons of limestone from the hillside southeast of the cave. It ended as the sun was setting, after hours of resuscitation efforts and Wallis and Sagendorf were declared dead. “Unknown causes” were cited by the medical professionals at the scene.
In its extensive front-page coverage of the tragedy, The Schoharie Republican, gave pause to recognize Eliza Millspaugh as an “unsung heroine,” the telephone operator through whose exchange all calls to and from the caverns lodge had to pass that day.
“Exhausted, Mrs. Millspaugh sat for hours through a torrent of calls which would have overwhelmed an exchange of thrice the capacity of the one she manned. Her aged father cared for her little granddaughter during the tremendous strain under which she labored in doing her bit in the effort to save the lives of two men.”
Parts taken from The Cave electrician’s Widow: The Tragedy at Howe Caverns and Dramatic Courtroom Fight for Justice.