The 1876 Arsenal Hill Explosion

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 52, 1984, No. 3

The 1876 Arsenal Hill Explosion

BY MELVIN L. BASHORE

"THERE ARE SOME KINDS OF EXPERIENCE WHICH A person having passed through once in this life, never desires a repetition. Of this kind was the explosion of the powder magazines on Arsenal Hill." Those who witnessed the devastating explosion that Brigham Young wrote to his son Arta about would have echoed his sentiments. Accountably, it was one of the most terrible accidents on record in pioneer Utah.

On Wednesday, April 5, 1876, Salt Lake City was teeming with its semiannual influx of visitors to the general conference of the Mormon church. Conference-goers throughout the territory arrived early to visit friends and relatives and to take advantage of the special sales offered by local merchants. A raw north wind kept most people inside homes and stores during the day. A group of young boys, undaunted by the bitter weather, played ball on the old Deseret Baseball Grounds behind the old city wall on Arsenal Hill. No one suspected or was prepared for the disaster and havoc that would wrack the northern portions of the city that evening.

At 5:00 P.M. an explosion of the powder magazines on Arsenal Hill rocked the city. The forty-second interval between the first and last of the three devastating blasts threw many citizens into a panic and caused widespread destruction. A deaf gentleman, quietly enjoying dinner at a restaurant opposite the Townsend House hotel, tried to find refuge from the window glass suddenly breaking over him. Although unharmed, he said, "it seemed as though the place was being blown to pieces." Initial reactions varied considerably. The immediate cause of the earthshaking concussions was not apparent to most people. Not a few thought the veritable judgment day had come upon them. One distraught mother was reported to have run out of the house with her three children, whom she gathered around her kneeling in the street and imploring heavenward, "The end of the world! O, Lord, have mercy on us!" Two ladies reportedly rushed into the arms of a stranger on the street, shouting "Brother, let us pray; the world's coming to an end!"

Some thought that an earthquake or volcanic eruption was in progress. Some confided that they feared that the soldiers at Fort Douglas were cannonading the city to drive the Mormons out. Conversely, it was reported that others thought that Brigham Young was blowing up the city to rid it of the Gentiles. The thirty boys playing on the old Deseret Baseball Grounds, a quarter-mile southwest of the powder magazines, immediately realized the source of the blast. The force of the shock knocked several of them unconscious. Those who were able scurried to safety behind the old city wall and then fled in the wildest excitement to their homes.

The first minute of panic and confusion, as horses stampeded and wagons overturned, was followed by a migration of curious people to the explosion site. Hordes of excited onlookers ascended the steep hill to four craters that marked the site of the powder magazines. Sagebrush was swept from around them. Fragments of the buildings and powder containers were strewn in the area.

The vanguard of the crowd sickened at finding bits of charred flesh and pieces of clothing scattered up to a distance of a half-mile from the blast site. These grisly items were gathered up and taken to the city hall where they were placed on public display for identification. Children were unable to eat that night, made sick at the sight of human fragments being carried from the hill. Boots with severed feet in them and bits of clothing were found to belong to two teenage boys, Charles Richardson and Frank Hill, who were identified as the gruesome casualties. The mother of one of the boys went into shock at this horrifying news, never entirely recovering. The boys had been grazing their small herd of cattle on the side of Ensign Peak. Having seen a flock of wild chickens the previous day, Richardson had taken a gun along. The powder magazines had long been the object of thoughtless target shooting, and it was widely surmised that these boys had fired into the door of one of the magazines.

In addition to Richardson and Hill, a young boy and a pregnant mother lost their lives. Three and a half year old Joseph H. Raddon, while playing with a half-dozen other children in his father's yard, was instantly killed by a hurtling rock. The five-pound missile passed entirely through his chest, carrying away his heart and lungs. On the opposite side of the hill in the Nineteenth Ward, a pregnant woman, Mrs. Mary Jane Van Natta, was struck by a boulder while pumping water at her neighbor's well, three-fourths of a mile due west of the magazines. The rock struck her in the back causing instant death.

The next day an inquest was held at the city hall. A preliminary verdict of the coroner's jury posited that the explosion was caused by a burning paper wad shot from a gun igniting loose powder that was strewn around the magazines. The jury also deemed the explosion accidental, attaching no blame to any persons or companies. The Salt Lake Tribune objected to this conclusion, calling it a "most remarkable verdict" and citing the lack of evidence to support that assumption. That elicited a hasty response from one of the jurors, Joseph Gorlincks, that no official statement had been yet issued by the jury. He said that the jury had not reached a conclusion as to the cause of the explosion but had merely formed a preliminary opinion.

The jury was unable to determine which magazine exploded first, although Deseret News journalist John Nicholson testified that the ZCMI magazine was the last to explode. The Du Pont Company's agent B. W. E. Jennens testified that he had notified city officials about the dangerous shooting practices and was in the process of replacing Du Pont's bullet-riddled door with a stronger one before the blast occurred. All magazines had been inspected by the city during the course of construction. Two were built of brick and two of rock. All had tin roofs and iron-faced doors. The site had been selected by city officials because of its elevation above the settled portion of the city. The city had not placed any restrictions on the quantity or kind of explosives stored, nor had any concern been manifested in having the city regulate their storage. An estimated 45 tons of explosives were in storage at the time of the explosion.

The widespread devastation was attributed to the site's commanding elevation above the city and the rock and brick structures, which produced weighty projectiles. Some 500 tons of rock and other material was hurtled into the air. A Civil War veteran said that "Fredericksburg after being bombarded for a month did not show so much sign of wreck as Salt Lake did."

Shingleton's saloon, opposite the Salt Lake Theatre, exhibited a 115-pound boulder. It had been hurled over a mile before it penetrated the roof and saloon floor and came to rest twenty inches deep in the earthen cellar floor. It came within two feet of striking two men sitting at a table. C R. Savage's photograph gallery was a "sad wreck," suffering an estimated $500 in damage. Scores of huge plate glass windows in the business district, valued at from $50 to $500 each, were shattered by hurtling rocks and shock waves. The Tabernacle, where the Mormon conference would be held, lost nearly a thousand window panes on the north side. Conference proceeded in the building after cloth was nailed over the exposed openings. Brigham Young caught a "severe cold" from the wintry drafts, which absented him from the last two days of meetings.

The effect of the explosion in City Creek Canyon, directly beneath the powder storehouses, was devastating. Two of Daniel H. Wells's daughters walking in the canyon were thrown to the ground and badly bruised by the force of the concussion. At the mouth of the canyon the tanks of the waterworks and the dwelling house connected with it were crushed. The Empire Mill owned by Brigham Young — situated in the canyon nearly due east of the magazines — probably suffered more than any other single structure. A worker loading a wagon next to the flour mill had a portion of the building collapse on him. "The floor over the wheel house was lifted bodily up, fifty joists and thirty pieces of framing were broken and one piece of timber a foot square snapped in two." The miller's adobe house was damaged considerably and had to be demolished. The shattered windows were hurled with such force that pieces were embedded an inch deep in solid red pine joists and nearby trees.

Damage in the residential areas of the city was extensive and occurred as far away as the Tenth Ward on the eastern limit of the city, in the Third Ward on the south, and the Fifth and Sixth Wards on the west. The explosion was heard by miners at Bingham Canyon; and John D. Lee, confined at the penitentiary six miles from the city, reported that the cells and windows shook. The explosion and shock were reportedly heard and felt as far north as Kaysville and Farmington, almost twenty miles away. Most of the direct damage from shelling occurred within a mile and a half radius of the powder magazines. Some of the private residences that suffered the most damage included the homes of Bishop Alonzo H. Raleigh near Warm Springs, Heber P. Kimball at the mouth of City Creek Canyon, and E. L. T. Harrison on the bench and the elegant residences of Feramorz Little and William H. Hooper. Someone remarked that it looked as if Captain Hooper's house "had gone through a threshing machine." A fifty-pound rock crashed through Mayor Little's unfinished home, penetrating the roof and three succeeding floors below. Rocks bombarded Kimball's home, one landing in a bed and another smashing a just-vacated table covered with dishes. Harrison's home was extensively damaged; door panels were forced out and plaster work torn away. Mrs. Harrison was thrown from her parlor chair by the force of the concussion, and she and her infant were showered with shattered glass, suffering severe flesh wounds.

A vivid description of a home that was more than a mile from the explosion site is representative of the damage sustained in the blast area:

The house seemed perfectly riddled, glass covering everything, locks broken entirely off, and things hurled about generally. On my mantel-piece stands a rack filled as a medicine chest. The bottles we[re] thrown about almost everywhere and a large bottle of red ink seemed to have taken the entire sweep of the room, as the ink was thrown far under the bed, while the bottle stood on its bottom on the opposite side of the room. The screws holding the teeth of the sewing machine were even blown across the room under the stove, and my bed was covered with burnt powder. . . . The walls of our house, a new brick one, are badly cracked. . . .

Although many homes and businesses providentially escaped bombardment by flying debris, window damage was widespread. The shock waves "literally smashed the whole sash work in the 19th, 18th, 17th, 14th, 13th, 12th, 11th and 20th wards to atoms." The wooden sidewalks and streets in the business district were littered with broken panes of expensive plate glass. Some of the businesses that suffered window breakage included the newly opened ZCMI store, Eagle Emporium, Deseret National Bank, Townsend House hotel, Wasatch Drug Store, and W. F. Raybould's bookstore. The sheer quantity of glass breakage posed serious disposal and replacement problems. Many residents spent cold evenings huddled around fireplaces in drafty rooms until replacement sashes could be purchased. The commercial glass supply houses in the city were ill prepared to handle the requests for replacement glass. The "panic for glass" was immediate as window supply houses and glaziers tried to meet the emergency needs of the city. The morning after the explosion, Fred Culmer, a Salt Lake glass merchant, began purchasing and shipping glass stock from merchants in other cities in the territory. He publicly responded to rumors of unfair but unfounded rate hikes. Many businesses, homes, and public buildings temporarily covered their gaping window frames with boards, calico, or other fabric until glass could be purchased. In a few instances some were "keeping open house."

Damage estimates ranged widely, varying from over a $ 100,000 to a New York Herald estimate of $500,000. The damage to glass alone was estimated at nearly $50,000. Repair estimates on some of the severely damaged homes ranged from $3,000 to $4,000 each. The loss on the four buildings that housed the blasting and sporting powder and their contents was appraised at $26,000. Admittedly, the real cost of the damage was incalculable.

Feelings of gratitude for having been spared were prevalent throughout the community. People questioned whether any other disaster of similar magnitude had resulted in so few being killed or wounded. Mormons saw the hand of God in their merciful preservation. It was mentioned in a church meeting that one of Apostle John Taylor's boys, playing in City Creek Canyon, heeded "a voice commanding him to go home." He and his playmates who accompanied him home were spared a possible accident by following this spirit-born prompting. Rachel R. Grant, Caroline Raleigh, and Elizabeth Stayner similarly testified that the preservation of so many was a divine manifestation.

The immediate concern in the organized cleanup and reconstruction effort focused on the safety of the citizens. Parents were warned to restrict their children from visiting the scene of the explosion. An immense amount of unexploded Hercules powder remained scattered around the site. City officials sent a squad of men to search for and pick up unexpended powder. Newspapers reported sticks of Hercules powder being discovered in yards and gardens as late as one month after the explosion.

The need for placing new powder magazines in a safer location became paramount when the public learned that two carloads of powder were en route and delivery expected within days of the disaster. City officials called a special meeting on April 7 to expedite this search. John Sharp, Sr., and Elias Morris were appointed by Mayor Little as a special committee to recommend a new location for the erection of explosives storage facilities. After investigating several sites the committee recommended a location on the bench near the northern boundary of the city and northeast of the Warm Springs. They deemed this "safer and more suitable" than any other location within the city. The site had the additional advantage of allowing powder-laden railroad cars to be switched off the main track, unloaded at the Utah Central Railroad depot, and hauled through city streets up to Arsenal Hill. The committee also recommended the magazines be constructed of adobe.

Residents in the neighborhood of the proposed site unsuccessfully filed a petition against the selection and acceptance of this location. Another petition filed by Bishop Thomas Taylor and forty-five others requested the removal of powder wagons kept in the downtown business area by B. W. E. Jennens. Labeling that practice "a constant menace to their lives and property," the council instructed City Marshal Andrew Burt to enforce their immediate removal. Powder companies were granted the right to begin constructing new facilities in compliance with "An Ordinance Relating to Powder Magazines and the Storage and Sale of Powder and Other Explosive Compounds" drafted by the Committee on Municipal Laws and passed by the city council on April 18. Jennens had the Du Pont Company's new powder storage warehouse completed by the first week in May on the bench several hundred feet above the railroad, a half-mile north of the Warm Springs. It was double-wall construction built of brick, the outer wall being thirteen inches thick and the inner wall four inches thick, separated by a three-inch air chamber. The roof was covered with galvanized sheet iron, and the double doors were of iron, five-sixteenths of an inch thick. The four other magazines were located south of the Du Pont warehouse, the last one being constructed almost directly over the Warm Springs.

The Arsenal Hill explosion was widely reported throughout the United States and Great Britain. The interest in this disaster caused other cities to direct their attention to the condition and location of their own powder warehouses. City authorities in San Francisco were concerned that the Giant Powder Company manufactured explosives only six miles from the city hall. Company officials invited the concerned authorities to a demonstration of the combustibility of their product. A hundred-pound weight was dropped from a height of thirty feet onto a box containing fifty pounds of powder. City officials unceremoniously scattered, sheepishly but cautiously returning to examine an utterly smashed but otherwise unexploded mass. The Ogden City Council, responding to citizen inquiries and concern for safety, investigated relocating their magazines.

The Arsenal Hill explosion had such a fearful impact on the residents of Salt Lake City that the Deseret News Weekly predicted that time would henceforth be reckoned from this eventful happening. Notwithstanding the prediction, the memory of this disaster seems to have receded into the past. From this disastrous experience, Salt Lake City gained a more enforceable explosives ordinance and insured its citizens a safer future. It may have forestalled future calamities, but it came too late to prevent one of pioneer Utah's worst disasters.

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