John Turner Lee's 100-year-old tombstone in East Kempsey Cemetery states that he was "accidentally killed by the Kempsey Mail Train".
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John survived an earlier potentially fatal incident only to meet his demise at the same location thirty years later.
In 1891, John and William McKay Duncan were both working at Dangar and Watt's sawmill.
This was the first sawmill to operate in Kempsey and was started in 1878 by the unlikely alliance of W T Dangar, a saddler, and John Watt, a chemist.
The extensive works were located at Commandant Hill in what is now South Kempsey.
William was born in Dundee, Scotland around 1846 and in 1874 married Ann Cooper of Austral Eden. William's father, John, had come to Australia as a mariner aboard a sailing ship in 1854. At Geelong, however, he heard of the gold rushes and deserted his ship to try his luck.
William and a brother came to Australia to find him but were unsuccessful. In 1874, William married Ann Cooper at Austral Eden. By 1891, they had seven children with Ann expecting her eighth. John Turner Lee was one of the sons of Joshua Lee, one of the earliest white settlers on the Macleay.
John was very hard of hearing and to make him hear, it was said one had to get right up against his ear and "sing out loudly and distinctly".
On the morning of February 7, 1891, William and John were both at work at the sawmill. William saw John standing near a large flitch of timber being sawn about to fall and shouted a warning to him.
When John, because of his deafness, failed to hear the warning, William ran to the siding and pushed John clear, however the falling timber struck William on the head and he was killed instantly.
Public appeals were held to raise money for Ann Duncan, who was to give birth to her eighth child in April, just two months later.
The appeals were coordinated by Dangar and Watt and raised several hundred pounds for the widow and orphans. She was able to acquire a house in River Street and in 1900 remarried Robert Butterfield.
Dangar and Watt's sawmill was dismantled in 1916 to make way for the railway which was coming to Kempsey and the railway bridge was built over the site.
On Monday morning May 23, 1921, John left his Commandant Hill home to walk across the railway bridge to his workplace in Central Kempsey. He had now resumed his former trade of bootmaker.
As he crossed the railway line to reach the footbridge, he was struck by the Kempsey Mail Train and killed instantly. His poor hearing had let him down one last time, thirty years after his earlier escape from death in nearly the same spot.
