From The Connecticut River Valley in Southern Vermont and New Hampshire: Historical Sketches by Lyman S. Hayes, Tuttle Co., Marble City Press, Rutland, VT., 1929, page 340:
PHINEAS GAGE LIVED NINETEEN YEARS AFTER A TAMPING BAR WAS BLOWN THROUGH HIS BRAIN
During the building of the Rutland road, September 15, 1847, a peculiar accident occurred which in all the intervening years has been considered the most remarkable in its results of any recorded in the medical world. A workman named Phineas Gage had a long iron bar blown entirely through his head and brain, by a premature discharge of a blast while making the rock cut a mile east of Cavendish station. The strange thing was that the man recovered and was able to work about 19 years thereafter. It was such a marvelous thing to relate that it was doubted by physicians everyywhere and close investigation was made by surgeons from other states. The "tamping bar" was three feet and a half long and tapered at the upper end a distance of eight inches to half an inch in diameter at the lower end. It was very smooth like a spindle and passed through the left cheek. The bar entered the head on the lower part of brain and through the skull at the top of the head. In later years, the man expressed a desire that after his death his skull, as well as the bar that passed through it, should be preserved, and the two are now in the museum of the Massachusetts Medical College at Boston.