The Allegheny Arsenal Explosion

On September seventeenth, eighteen sixty-two, the same day as the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, a different kind of catastrophe unfolded in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. At the Allegheny Arsenal, a complex of munitions buildings that supplied the Union Army, three explosions tore through the building known as the Laboratory, where workers were making rifle cartridges.

Seventy-eight people died. Most of them were young women and girls.

The arsenal commanders preferred to hire young women for cartridge work because they were considered more careful and reliable than men, and because they did not smoke. On September seventeenth, one hundred and fifty-six women were at work in the Laboratory building. The spark that set off the first explosion is widely believed to have come from the iron shoe of a delivery horse striking the roadway, though an Army inquiry could not conclusively determine the cause. Two more explosions followed in rapid succession.

Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition. Fifty-four victims were unidentified. They were buried together in a mass grave in the Allegheny Cemetery, which is a few blocks from where you are now driving. The grave is there still.

The Allegheny Arsenal explosion was the largest civilian disaster of the American Civil War, measured by deaths in a single incident on home soil. It received brief newspaper coverage. The war was absorbing everything. Antietam had killed more than three thousand soldiers in a single day, and that was the story everyone was reading.

The women of the arsenal had been making the ammunition for the army, earning wages that helped support their families while the men were at the front. Their names were eventually collected by researchers in the twentieth century. They were real people, doing necessary work, in a place that was not safe enough to do it.