This is Off-Beat: a slow read of the public-record substrate underneath a story Lexington is telling itself this week. The substrate, on inspection, isn’t in Lexington at all. It’s thirty miles down the rail line.
At three-thirty on the morning of Sunday, September 24, 1882, the Sells Brothers Circus train ran past its brakes about three hundred yards short of the Paint Lick depot, in Garrard County, Kentucky. The cars piled. The cages — wood and iron, lashed to flatcars — burst. A tiger and a lion stepped out into the dark. Three people were dead. Eleven to twenty more were hurt. The county physician walked down from his house up the road and later wrote about what he found there…