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By Tim Ruzek

With rakes tied to poles, the Rayman brothers and two others frantically dragged the bottom of the frigid Cedar River from boats.

Frankie Clay Jr., a 13-year-old Austin boy, had fallen through the ice of a river bend while skating with friends that Sunday afternoon in December 1906.

They had been skating on the Cedar’s backwaters upstream of the downtown dam on what’s Austin Mill Pond today but, at the time, covered a larger area.

Frankie and two others had decided to skate upstream to a river bend the Rayman house overlooked from Lansing Avenue (First Drive NW). When Frankie fell through ice, Frank Rayman heard cries from inside his home.

The search for Frankie ensued for about 30 minutes until a searcher’s rake caught the boy in 15 feet of water. Doctors tried for more than two hours to revive Frankie but to no avail.

His parents — well-known train conductor Frank Clay and wife Ida — were notified at the Elks Club’s annual memorial service downtown. The large crowd that included George and Lillian Hormel was overcome with sadness.

The Herald noted the “same sorrow might have come to any one of a hundred homes in our city whose boys could not resist the charms of the river. But the blow has fallen upon those (the Clays) perhaps lest able to bear it.”

This referred to the Clays’ son, Rex, who was paralyzed below the waist a year earlier when he broke his spine and several vertebrae after being crushed between a train car and the Lyle railroad depot’s loading platform 12 miles south of Austin. A train brakeman, Rex was climbing down the side of a freight car as it approached the depot.

Two days before Frankie’s drowning, the Clays filed a lawsuit against the railroad company and conductor for Rex, who was 17 at the time. The Herald later called this case the “biggest personal injury verdict” in the Minnesota Supreme Court’s history.

“Words fail utterly to express the widespread sympathy that is felt in every home in our city, in the sorrow that has fallen upon the W.F. Clay home,” the Herald wrote. “Children weep for the bright and daring little companion (Frankie) who was so full of life and activity, fun and mischief.”

Frank Clay lost his first wife and an infant child years earlier. Ida then gave birth to three boys with Frank, who rose the ranks to train conductor. This kept Frank away for weeks at a time. Yet, he was much respected and called one of “Austin’s respected pioneer citizens.”

The Clays’ home was on East Water Street (Fourth Ave NE), just east of the Cedar’s dam.

Upstream of the dam in the early 1900s, the river covered a larger area, featuring several channels and islands.

To some Austinites, the Cedar’s bend upstream from what today is Austin Mill Pond was “the most dangerous part in the stream,” the Herald wrote Dec. 3, 1906. “At this point, the river is the last to freeze and the first to thaw on account of the current.”

This bend survived dredging and filling in the 1910s-1920s that created Horace Austin State Park and Austin Mill Pond by connecting islands to the mainland and filling in swamp. But the bend was filled in the 1960s after the city cut a new channel.

In 1906, Frankie Clay was skating on the river’s backwaters with a friend and many others that Sunday afternoon of Dec. 2, 1906. The two then joined a young man in skating upstream.

Frankie’s friend and the man reached the bend around 3 p.m. The two stopped after finding the ice unsafe there but Frankie “sped on,” skating to the river’s center 75 feet from shore. He stopped for a moment before falling through ice.

Two men slid a boat onto the river until it broke through the ice and “pushed their way to the open place through which the boy had disappeared,” the Herald wrote. Two other men slid another boat on the ice to head downstream.

After retrieving the boy, the men rolled Frankie on the shore to get water out of his lungs and carried him uphill to the Rayman home, where doctors tried to revive him At 10 p.m., his body was taken to the Clay home.

News of Frankie’s death ran statewide, including in Minneapolis, Duluth and Mankato.

On Nov. 30, 1906 – a week from the train accident’s one-year anniversary — the Clay family filed its, seeking $50,000 in damages ($1.5 million today).

Two days later, the Clays lost Frankie.

Referencing the injury to Rex, the Herald wrote: “This double affliction is indeed a heavy burden too heavy for human hearts to bear. The whole community feels deeply for the afflicted ones.”

Two weeks after burying Frankie at Oakwood Cemetery, the Clays’ lawsuit moved forward. After two jury trials in civil court, the Clays won $35,000 in damages (more than $1 million today). Minnesota’s Supreme Court later affirmed the verdict.

Rex died two weeks after the jury’s verdict. He was buried next to Frankie.

A few months later, Frank Clay retired after 40 years with the railroad. He then was elected in 1910 to the Austin City Council. 

If you have questions or a column idea, you can reach out to Tim Ruzek at tim@mowerdistrict.org