Remembering local victims of the Titanic

One hundred years ago, Boston Globe readers opened their newspapers and were shocked to learn that the unthinkable had happened: The mighty Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable, state-of-the-art luxury liner, had hit an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the ocean, taking about 1,500 lives.

Several passengers from Southeastern Massachusetts were aboard the Titanic on its first voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. Many of them never made it home.

On April 16, 1912, readers who turned to page 5 of the Globe would have seen the pudgy face of Jacques Futrelle, a novelist from Scituate. Wearing round eyeglasses and his hair swept neatly to the side, Futrelle looked scholarly. He was on the Titanic with his wife, Lily May, and had just celebrated his 37th birthday.

They would have read about Frank D. Millet, a Mattapoisett native who was an internationally known artist. He traveled all over, and lived in New York and Worcestershire, England. He was on his way to New York to visit his brother.

There was a black-and-white photograph of John Maguire, a salesman with the Dunbar Pattern Co. in Brockton. He was dressed smartly in a jacket and tie, with a stiff white collar. He was returning from his first trip abroad - which turned out to be his last.

Above Maguire on page 5, there was a photo of George Quincy Clifford. The 40-year-old Stoughton resident was president of the George E. Belcher Last Co., a factory that produced shoe molds. He had been traveling on business with Maguire and another local shoe industry executive.

A century has passed since the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, yet the stories of these passengers and others on the ill-fated voyage still resonate.

That is why Stoughton historian David Allen Lambert decided to lead an effort to dedicate a plaque in his town in memory of Clifford. Many people in Stoughton don’t know that the town lost one of its own in the disaster, he said.

Lambert first heard of Clifford when he was 12. He said Clifford was originally from Brockton and moved to Stoughton in 1909.

In February 1912, he left for Europe accompanied by Maguire and Walter Chamberlain Porter, the president of a shoe last company in Worcester.

Clifford “was out looking for contracts,’’ said Lambert, vice president of the Stoughton Historical Society, who works as an online genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. “Sadly, when he was en route his mother died, and he was notified by telegram when he reached Europe.’’

Clifford’s shoe mold company was located in a brick building at 4 Capen St., off Route 139. The business is long gone, but the building is still there, now called the Rose Forte Apartment building. The plaque will be unveiled there on Sunday at 2 p.m. and the public is invited to attend.

A brief memorial service will be held in honor of the Titanic victims, and some of Clifford’s descendants are expected to be there to unveil the memorial.

The dedication ceremony will conclude around 2:20 p.m. - about 100 years and 12 hours to the moment the ship disappeared into the depths of the Atlantic. “The bow of the ship slipped through the waves at 2:20 a.m.,’’ said Lambert.

The sinking of the ship was vividly described by Lily May Futrelle, one of the estimated 705 survivors of the Titanic. A native of Georgia, she and her husband, Jacques, resided in Scituate in a home they called “Stepping Stones.’’

Futrelle wrote a detailed account of the sinking a few weeks after the disaster. Her two-part series “remains one of earliest and most authoritative eyewitness accounts of the catastrophe,’’ according to Donald E. Wilkes Jr., a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law who has done research and written about the Futrelles.

“I think she was a fascinating person,’’ said Wilkes, in a recent telephone interview. She was married to an accomplished author and was a writer herself. She once hosted a radio program for aspiring writers, and her 1911 novel “Secretary of Frivolous Affairs” was later made into a movie, he said.