It is true that struggling can make you sink in further, but would you actually sink far enough to drown? The friction between the sand particles is much-reduced, meaning it can’t support your weight anymore and at first you do sink.
But then the water and sand separate, leaving a layer of densely packed wet sand which can trap it. The ground looks solid, but when you step on it the sand begins to liquefy. Quicksand usually consists of sand or clay and salt that’s become waterlogged, often in river deltas. Yet the evidence that the more you struggle, the further you sink until you drown, is rather lacking. They were in everything from Lawrence of Arabia to The Monkees. In the 1960s, one in 35 films featured quicksands. There are so many films featuring death by quicksand that Slate journalist Daniel Engbar has even tracked the peak quicksand years in film. All that’s left is sinister sand, and maybe his hat. A man is caught in quicksand, begging onlookers for help, but the more he struggles, the further down into the sand he is sucked until eventually he disappears. She and her unique beauty are now just another memory nearly lost to the progress of time.We’ve all seen the films. Slowly, memories of the stately lady who sat silently and watched over the track faded. The L&N Railroad, the successor of the L&E, blasted her profile away to move the track and add more stability to the rails in this section, and to reduce the number of rock falls that blocked the tracks. The Day Book, July 15, 1914, page 7īy the 1920s, the need for additional room for a side track led to the death of the stone woman. The other was when a raft of timber in Quicksand Creek crashed against the foot of the cliff, severely crippling one of the workmen. One came when a 12- year-old negro girl fell from the top of the cliff and was killed. The stone woman of Breathitt county has seen two tragedies in the last few years. Quicksand, Ky.-A woman of stone, looking out of the face of a 150-foot cliff, greets the traveler just below the South Fork of the Quicksand Creek, near here.Ī freak of nature has left the face and bust plainly discernible, while vegetation at the top of the cliff might easily be imagined as a pompadour. Little information about the “lady” is recorded in the pages of history except for a short sketch that was printed in a Chicago daily tabloid and later printed in newspapers around the country. The spot, seen only from a southbound train, became known as “the Stone Lady.”Įvery day for nearly thirty years, trains laden heavy with their wooden haul steamed past the lady on their way north through Jackson and points beyond. The result was a strange silhouette that gave the general appearance of a woman staring off in the distance with her plummed hat atop her head as trains chugged by headed for Quicksand. Crews used dynamite to cut back the hillside to make a railbed wide enough for a single track to pass below the high riverbank cliffs. The village of Quicksand while the Stone Lady was still on her watch.Īs the railroad bed passed over the bridges at the mouth of King’s Branch and Lick Branch, the possible location for the tracks narrowed. Surveyors and workmen cleared the path along the river to extend the tracks 2.42 miles to the Quicksand and soon laid the tracks.
The bustling town was added to the L&E line to transport millions of board feet for sawn lumber out of the mountains to feed the voracious appetites for construction in Lexington, Frankfort, Louisville, and Cincinnati. The “lady” was created in 1891 when the Lexington & Eastern Railroad extended its tracks from the train yards at Jackson to a new spur at Quicksand. The famous “Stone Lady” of Quicksand was no more. It lasted about 30 years, and then one summer, it disappeared. This strange site, created by the need to remove a hillside, was one of the most famous mountain locations that visitors always waited to see. She came into view as the train rounded a curve along the Kentucky River.
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