Qualla: Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. On the morning of February 28, 1958, twenty-seven Floyd County families sent their children to school as they did every morning. Forty-eight children boarded the bus that rolled out of Lancer and Emma and Auxier and through the river bottoms toward the high school in Prestonsburg. By midmorning, twenty-six of those children would be dead. So would their driver. The bus had skidded into the back of a wrecker truck on U.S. Route 23, lurched off the embankment, and plunged into the icy, rain-swollen Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Fifty-three hours passed before Navy divers from Norfolk found the bus, submerged and swept downstream. It remains, sixty-eight years later, the third-deadliest bus crash in American history.

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: The Morning

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. It had rained for days. The Levisa Fork was running fast and brown, well above its banks, swallowing the river-bottom roads. The temperature was a few degrees above freezing. John Alex DeRossett, the driver, was running his usual Bus 27 route, picking up elementary and high schoo...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: The Crash

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. What happened on U.S. 23 took only seconds. The bus came up behind a wrecker truck and clipped its rear. The wrecker drove on, the driver apparently unaware of the contact. The bus, knocked off course, rolled down the embankment and into the river. The Levisa Fork was deep, fast,...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: Fifty-three Hours

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. The recovery operation that followed became the largest in Kentucky's peacetime history. Governor Happy Chandler called up five hundred National Guardsmen from nine cities. Divers from the United States Navy were flown in from Norfolk. Local volunteers - miners, farmers, anyone w...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: What the Songs Remembered

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Within months, two recordings appeared. The Stanley Brothers, the Appalachian bluegrass duo from just over the Virginia line, released No School Bus in Heaven. Ralph Bowman cut The Tragedy of Bus 27. Neither charted nationally, but both got regional airplay across the coalfields....

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Prestonsburg, Kentucky bus crash: The Sign by the Guardrail

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. On Route 1428, the old alignment of U.S. 23, six tenths of a mile east of the Route 302 intersection, a sign stands by the guardrail. It shows the shadow of a school bus with the names of the children and the driver overlaid on it - twenty-seven names that should not be there. A ...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain