History is full of close calls that you never hear about. Days or events that could have completely changed the course of our lives and our communities but for some twist of fate. We don’t tend to remember these because of what didn’t happen, and so acts of heroism can quickly be forgotten.
Henry Oscar Montgomery is one of those forgotten heroes. Just a working class 54 year old father, driving a fuel truck for Myers Oil out of Statesville to make ends meet and provide for his family.
On May 12th, 1948, Montgomery was making a scheduled delivery to Charlie Jenkins’ service station in Harmony, NC, pumping gas from his fuel truck into the station’s underground tank. As he was waiting for the transfer to finish he stepped inside the station, maybe for a drink, maybe to have paperwork signed, none of the accounts say just why. While he was inside a man walking by lit a cigarette and carelessly discarded a still-burning match near the truck. The match set the fumes alight and an immediate burst of flames was the result, with the offending smoker exclaiming “Oh my God!’
Montgomery rushed out to find flames pouring from the underground tank and frantically moved to put them out by placing a cap over the vent hole and filler pipe for the underground tank, hoping to deprive the blaze of oxygen and smother it. Unfortunately for Montgomery, the cap itself caught fire and the spreading flames caused him to yank the hose from his truck free of the tank opening and throw it away from himself towards the road.
The flames did not subside though, and in the process of detaching his truck and its 560 gallons of gasoline and 100 gallons of kerosene from the hole, the flames erupted 15 feet into the air and caught on his pants, forcing him to pull them off and throw them away to avoid being further burned. In the process he also had the clarity of mind to throw his wallet with $400 (probably company money related to his job) in it towards the service station building to avoid it being burned up.
As all this was happening some less than situationally-aware bystanders had gathered to see what was going on. Montgomery yelled “This thing is liable to pop off any minute!” and urged them to run away. It seems no one really took his advice.
Thinking quickly, the then pants-less driver hopped up into his truck, put one foot in the cab, one foot on the running board, started the engine and slammed it into gear. Pulling out onto NC highway 21 he began heading north, away from the middle of Harmony and the gathering crowd of people with a burning fuel hose dragging behind and flames on the back of his truck shooting up possibly as high as 50 feet into the air if witnesses can be believed.
“I made a scary sight coming down that road,” he told a newspaper after the incident. “Drivers would see me coming and take off through fields or whatever else was on the side of the road.” One man told Montgomery his truck looked like “Hell itself coming down that road.“
At Jenkins’ Service Station, employees had been successful in stopping the tank fire using a combination of smothering tactics and fire extinguishers. One has to wonder if they afterwards stopped to marvel at the trail of burning gasoline now making its way up 21 north, away from them.
The Harmony Fire Department was also alerted but was slow to respond as they had trouble getting their truck cranked. By the time they arrived the crisis at the station had been averted but they apparently waited around a bit to see if the burning fuel truck might return before deciding to also head north on 21 to see what had become of it.
Back on the truck, Montgomery split his attention between the road and the trailing flames behind him. At the two mile mark it seemed the flames had died out so he came to a stop to assess the situation, but as soon as he did the back end of the truck quickly reignited. Hopping back up on the running board he high-tailed it further north on the highway, driving another mile and a half, probably ending up somewhere near Houstonville Road before the gasoline tank on the truck was finally emptied and the flames ran out of fuel.
With the fire now out, Montgomery once again put the truck in gear and headed back to Harmony to make sure the people at the service station had been as fortunate as he had, and must have been relieved to see they had been able to contain the fire at the tank mouth. The Harmony Fire Department truck met him on the road, starting in his direction just as he arrived back.
Montgomery retrieved his pants, his wallet, and probably just starting to feel the pain of being mildly burned below the knees, hopped back in the truck and headed for the hospital in Statesville.
He would be an invalid for five days afterwards while doctors tended his burned legs and hands.
His truck only suffered minor damage. The biggest loss was the fuel that had burned up on the surface of highway 21.
In the aftermath of the incident, people began to realize just how close to disaster the town of Harmony had been. A tanker truck with almost 700 gallons of high test fuel exploding in the very middle of the town would have likely not only killed the estimated 50-200 bystanders (depending on which accounts you believe) who had gathered to watch the incident, but would have leveled several businesses and no doubt killed and injured countless other residents. People began calling Montgomery a hero.
A coworker at Myers Oil named Mary Merritt thought Montgomery deserved more than just local recognition and contacted the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission to nominate Montgomery for a Carnegie Medal.
The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission was started by Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist in 1903 in order to honor “heroes of civilization,” whose lifesaving actions put them in stark contrast to the “heroes of barbarism, (who) maimed or killed” their fellow man.
Candidates for the award must be a civilian in the United States or Canada who voluntarily risk life and limb in order to save the life of another person or persons.
Nominees must also be submitted to the commission within two years of their heroic act and there must be enough evidence to support what happened.
Several representatives from the Carnegie Fund were dispatched to Harmony where they interviewed witnesses and employees of the service station. They found that Henry Oscar Montgomery’s actions were assuredly deserving of the Carnegie Medal, and in April of 1949, Montgomery was contacted to be told he would be receiving the medal. He didn’t know he had even been nominated.
When asked what made him decide to drive off with the truck rather than simply running away from the blaze, Montgomery simply said “I thought I had better get it away from all those people.”
Locally, a trust of sorts was also set up for Montgomery by some benefactors, who added $500 to it as an emergency fund should he ever need it. From the sound of things, Montgomery was reasonably disappointed he couldn’t use the money as he pleased. Especially since it seems he ended up having to pay his own medical bills after the incident.
Then in August of 1949, at the prompting of Mozelle Beam, who had submitted his name to the “Heart of Gold” radio program, he received another medal to add to his collection.
Henry Oscar Montgomery would pass away in September of 1953, just 5 years after all of this transpired.
After his death, his name would occasionally find its way back into the papers every so often as his mad dash up 21 was recalled by columnists and the “Out of Our Past” type columns that you often find in the Statesville Record & Landmark.
But today most people haven’t heard of the man who saved Harmony from utter destruction 76 years ago this month.
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