Minnesotans aboard the Titanic told dramatic stories of survival and loss

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John Pillsbury Snyder and his new wife, Nelle, had their honeymoon interrupted by the most infamous iceberg in history.

In 1912, the Minneapolis newlyweds — he was the grandson of a former governor and a member of the flour mill family, she the daughter of a merchant — were returning from Europe as first-class passengers on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

Several days into their cruise across the Atlantic Ocean, Snyder woke to the jolt of impact and his wife’s pleas to investigate. Soon they were slipping on flotation devices and boarding the first lifeboat off the starboard side of the doomed vessel.

A reader contacted Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-generated reporting project, to learn more about the Minnesotans who were aboard the Titanic when the ship once deemed “unsinkable” was rent asunder.

Including the Snyders, there were 35 passengers aboard the Titanic “known to be journeying — or in some way connected — to Minnesota,” historian Christopher Welter wrote in a 2007 Minnesota History article.

They came from a wide range of backgrounds, and included immigrants from Sweden, Finland and Norway who were traveling in steerage to join family or find work in Minnesota. Of all the first-, second- and third-class passengers with Minnesota ties, 16 survived, Welter wrote.

In a twist of fate, one who lived was a 21-year-old Duluth woman who said her death at that age had been prophesied by a fortune teller.

Among the dead: a Minneapolis millionaire who told his wife it would be wrong for him to escape on a lifeboat while there were still women onboard and (reportedly) a notorious con man who went by several aliases when he lived in Minnesota.

At the time the world’s largest luxury ocean liner, the Titanic left Southhampton, England, on April 10, 1912. After two more stops, it was loaded with 2,200 passengers and crew members.

Four days later, it crashed into an iceberg in the dark of night. The ruptured hull filled with water and the ship broke in half, dropping into the depths of the ocean. It all took less than three hours.

About 1,500 people died.

The newlywed Snyders survived, making it aboard the rescue vessel the Carpathia. In New York City, they were greeted by friends and family at the Waldorf. By the time they shared their story with reporters, the Snyders appeared collected.

“Bronzed and robust, Mr. Snyder showed no trace of the ordeal he had gone through,” wrote the Minnesota Journal. “Neither did Mrs. Snyder show any distressing effect of their terrible experience before and after the foundering of the White Star liner.”

“We were young people and when they told us to get into the lifeboat, we got in,” John Pillsbury Snyder told a crowd at the Minneapolis Commercial Club days after the experience, according to the Minneapolis Journal.

He went on to work in banking and the automobile business and died at age 71 while playing golf. Nelle Snyder lived to be 94. A decade after her passing, a Star Tribune reporter talked to the Snyders’ granddaughter Helen Waldron. At the time, St. Paul was about to host an exhibition featuring part of the ship’s hull.

“My grandmother was about 90 when we asked her whether they should raise the Titanic,” Waldron recalled. “She said: ‘No, I think it should be left alone as an international burial ground, but, boy, I sure would like to find my trunk.’”

Constance Willard, of Duluth, was traveling alone. She felt the impact when the Titanic hit the iceberg — but ignored it until she heard crowds of people in the hall outside of her first-class room.

When the 21-year-old first-class passenger finally talked to a steward, he told Willard to get dressed. The ship was in danger.

“Even then I did not get up in a hurry,” she told the Duluth News Tribune about three weeks later, when she returned home. “But when I finally did I looked in the mirror and it was then I recalled the fate prophesized for me by a fortune teller when I was 12 years old — that I would die when 21 on a trip to Europe."

Willard was shuffled into a lifeboat alongside some of the ship’s lowest-paying passengers and a handful of sailors. The Titanic went under within 20 minutes of their escape, she said.

“The ship was lighted until it disappeared under the waves,” she said. “Shortly after it had sank, the cries of those in the water [rang through] the air. Then all was still for a few seconds, and again the cries only fainter.”

Willard later moved to California, where she died when she was 73. According to a database of information about Titanic passengers, she preferred not to talk about the wreck.

Millionaire Walter D. Douglas, whose father founded what became the Quaker Oats Company, his wife, Mahala, and their maid Berthe Leroy were also on board as the ship began to go down. The Douglases had been traveling in Europe to find furnishings for their newly built Lake Minnetonka mansion.

Walter encouraged Mahala to get into a lifeboat without him. His final words to her, she told the Minneapolis Tribune, were, “You had better get into the boat. It would be safer. We can’t tell what may happen.”

She asked him to come with her and he said he couldn’t.

“I would not be a man or a gentleman if I left the Titanic while there was a woman or child on board. It’s all right. I’ll probably be with you again in a few minutes,” he told her, according to her account in the Tribune.

While Walter went down with the Titanic, Mahala lived and made her way back to Minneapolis. When she arrived, her family whisked her away from the crowds to their Lake Minnetonka home, called Waldon.

She never remarried, and died of a stroke in 1945. Before her death though, she traveled the world, sometimes aboard ships.

Weeks after the tragedy, the Minneapolis Journal wrote that the world’s greatest marine disaster took down with it another superlative: The world’s greatest crook, in the eyes of the New York Police Department and Scotland Yard.

Harry Silberberg had dozens of aliases, including one that falsely connected him to the Astor family. (John Jacob Astor IV also famously went down with the Titanic.)

While in Minneapolis, he had a double life, assuming two different identities. Under one, he married the stepdaughter of a millionaire. Under another, he ran a school of hypnotism.

He was known as a skilled baccarat player, and investigators theorized that he likely booked passage on the Titanic to bilk wealthy travelers.

Silberberg was such a slippery character, though, that it was tough to be sure. Later newspaper accounts questioned the reported death of the figure the Journal called the “Minneapolis Master Rogue.”

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