Burton, David L. "Friday the 13th: Richmond's Great Home Front Disaster."
Civil War Times Illustrated 21, No. 6 (Oct. 1982), pp. 36-41.
Friday the 13th
Richmond’s Great Homefront Disaster
By David L. Burton
Friday dawned much like many another dreary late winter Richmond day. It was
morning in a proud river city grown too rapidly into the capital of an infant
nation at war.
By this day, March 13, 1863, Richmonders had become accustomed to the
ever-present Yankee menace. They had been outside and around their city for the
past twenty-three months. But this fading winter had brought more trouble than
even the most stouthearted cosmopolitan Virginian could have imagined. First, a
smallpox epidemic had plagued residents, especially poorer ones. Then, in a city
whose population had roughly tripled in three years’ time, there were the twin
problems of inflation and critical food shortages, woes affecting the well-to-do
as well as the not so well-to-do.
Alabama’s Confederate senator, Clement C. Clay, was alarmed. "A general gloom
prevails here because of the scarcity and high price of food," he wrote to his
wife from the Rebel capital. "...Really there is a serious apprehension of
having to disband part of the army for want of food. In this city the poor
clerks and subaltern military officers are threatened with starvation, as they
cannot get board on their pay. God only knows what is to become of us."
Confederate War Department diarist John B. Jones put it this way: "The shadow
of the gaunt form of famine is upon us!" And as bad as matters were, they would
get worse. Richmonders had no way of knowing it, but in a week’s time they would
be faced with the season’s worst snowstorm and the all-too-familiar sorrow over
a fallen hero, this time the gallant John Pelham, artillerist extraordinaire.
As they went their ways on this Friday the 13th, Richmonders also had no way
of knowing that before noon one of the struggling Confederacy’s worst homefront
disasters would occur.
The first hint of tragedy was a dull, prolonged roar from the direction of
Brown’s Island, a mound of dirt in the James River at the base of Seventh
Street. The island, described two years earlier as a pretty little wilderness of
bamboo and brush wood, had been transformed into a collection of one-story,
frame buildings in which several hundred employees, most of them young girls,
produced much of the ammunition that kept the Confederate army fighting.
The roar startled some Richmonders, but many, used to hearing explosions from
the testing of ordnance at the nearby Tredegar Iron Works, paid scant attention.
Several minutes later, dense smoke made townsfolk aware that something indeed
was wrong. The telltale smoke came from the destruction of a department of the
Confederate States Laboratory, an installation referred to in early 1863 as the
salvation of the Confederacy.
"Terrible Laboratory Explosion on Brown’s Island - Between Forty and Fifty
Killed and Wounded - Horrible Scenes" was how Richmond’s Daily Examiner
summed up the event.
Within minutes of the explosion, pandemonium broke loose. "A tide of human
beings, among them the frantic mothers and kindred of the employees in the
Laboratory, immediately set towards the bridge leading to the island," the Examiner
reported. However, authorities had already taken possession of the bridge and
limited access to the island to rescue and medical workers.
The Examiner gave its account of the scene: "The apartment in which
the explosion occurred, about fifty feet in length and twenty in width, was
blown into a complete wreck, the roof lifted off, and the walls dashed out, the
ruins falling upon the operatives, and the horrors of fire were threatened to be
added to those of the explosion; but the flames were suppressed.
"While the male employees were laboring to rescue the helpless victims, the
most heart-rending lamentations and cries issued from the ruins from sufferers
rendered delirious from suffering and terror. No sooner was one helpless,
unrecognizable mass of humanity cared for and removed before the piteous appeals
of another would invoke the energy of the rescuers. Some ten to twenty were
taken from the ruins dead, and from twenty to thirty still alive, but suffering
the most terrible agonies, blind from burns, with their hair burned from their
heads, and the clothes hanging in burning shreds about their persons. Others
less injured ran wailing frantically, and rushing wildly into the nearest arms
for succor and relief. Mothers rushed about, throwing themselves upon the
corpses of the dead, and the persons of the wounded.
"The immediate treatment of the burned consisted in removing their clothing
and covering the body thickly with flour and cotton, saturated with oil;
chloroform was all administered. The sufferings of the wounded were alleviated
by these means in the interval between their rescue and removal to their homes,
or General Hospital No. 2, where many were taken. The returning ambulances
carrying the sufferers were besieged by the friends and relations of the
employees, and children clamored into the vehicles crying bitterly in their
search after sisters and brothers. The distress among friends was aggravated by
the fact that it was utterly impossible to recognize many of the wounded on
account of their disfigurement, except by bits of clothing, shoes.
"From an officer connected with the Laboratory we learn that the department
destroyed was in charge of Mr. McCarthy, superintendent. The condemned
cartridges were here broken by the girls [the laboratory’s employees], and
distributed, the bullets into one recepticle and the powder into another. It is
surmised that a percussion cap containing fulminating ingredients got mixed in
with the powder and created an explosion. Fortunately, there was but a small
quantity of powder in the department, or the greater force of the explosion
would have extended the ignition to the next department."
As tragic as the explosion appeared at the time, the magnitude of
the human disaster soon became more apparent. By Saturday night, twenty-nine
persons had died, and more deaths appeared certain. Then on Sunday, shaken
Richmonders could see funeral corteges moving in numerous directions through the
city, in several instances encountering each other as they wound their ways to
the same cemetery.
Eventually, at least forty-five of the sixty-eight explosion casualties died.
However, because of the incomplete nature of newspapers of the time and Richmond
cemetery records, establishing a precise death toll was not possible. Many of
the dead were young girls caught up in a war they could hardly hope to
By the Monday after the explosion, additional details of the human agony had
emerged. A 15-year-old boy had been wedged between a wall and some timbers, and
axes were used to free him. Burned horribly and suffering from a broken skull,
the boy lived until Wednesday.
Several girls whose clothes were on fire had run from the debris and plunged
into the river. "All are thought to have come out, save one — Martha Burley, who
is missing and is supposed to have drowned by accident or voluntarily in her
crazed state of mind," the Examiner reported.
A hero also had come to light. One girl, her clothes in flames, had run
toward another laboratory building in which a large quantity of gunpowder and
combustibles were kept. A male employee grabbed her just before she reached the
threshold. Witnesses said his actions saved numerous lives and worse damage.
Even though they had become accustomed to the horrors of war, Richmonders
were appalled by the laboratory tragedy. "Today a great calamity occurred in
this city," Jones of the War Department wrote in his diary for March 13. "In a
large room of one of the government laboratories an explosion took place,
killing instantly five or six persons, and wounding, it is feared fatally, some
thirty others. Most of them were little indigent girls!"
Perhaps no one was more shocked than Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the industrious
Pennsylvanian who, as the Confederates’ chief of ordnance, was responsible for
supplying ammunition for the Confederate army. "A fearful accident occurred at
our Laboratory here on Friday, the 13th of March," he wrote. After predicting
that the death toll might reach fifty, Gorgas added: "It is terrible to think
of—that so much suffering should arise from causes possibly within our control."
Gorgas knew what had become common knowledge in the capital; the tragedy had
been caused by an 18-year-old girl, Mary Ryan.
The colonel wrote in his diary: "The accident was caused by the ignition of a
friction primer in the hands of a grown girl by the name of Mary Ryan. She . .
.gave a clear account of the circumstances. The primer stuck in the varnishing
hoard and she struck the board three times very hard on the table to drive out
the primer. She says she was immediately blown up to the ceiling and on coming
down was again blown up."
Ryan, a native of Ireland, suffered with her injuries until the Monday after
the explosion. She died at her father’s home on Oregon Hill, a residential area
within a mile of the laboratory.
Gorgas, a man to whom strict safety precautions were an almost sacred
subject, ordered a thorough investigation of the explosion. So a three-officer
board conducted a probe and produced a report. Dated March 25, 1863, it
presented an interesting look at operations in a facility in which young girls
were pressed into the service of a country struggling for independence.
Captain Wesley N. Smith, superintendent of the laboratory, was in his office
across from the island when the explosion occurred. He arrived at the scene
within two minutes.
Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, while making a routine inspection of the
works, he had cautioned Miss Ryan about the dangerous work she was doing—filling
friction primers, the highly explosive devices used to ignite gunpowder in large
field pieces. Smith told the investigating board his warning was not prompted by
any carelessness on the part of Ryan, but was in keeping with his habit of
enforcing caution upon the laboratory employees.
At the end of the table at which Ryan was working, two or three employees
were filling cartridges, and at the lower part of the room was a coal-burning
stove. At another table in the room, a number of girls were breaking up
condemned cartridges, and also in the room several employees were boxing
percussion caps and friction primers. This latter work had been transferred from
its normal site while that building was being enlarged.
"Had this work been going on in a building devoted to that purpose
exclusively, the bursting of a primer might have been fatal to the individual
handling it but could not have caused such general destruction of life," the
investigating board quoted Smith as having said. "It was never intended that any
explosive materials should be placed in a room where a stove was used."
Philip Smith, the employees’ timekeeper on the island, said he was standing
in Main Street at the time of the explosion and hurried to the scene. He was
told by one of the wounded the captain had cautioned Mary Ryan earlier that
morning. Smith went to see her immediately. She "admitted to him that the
explosion had been caused by the bursting of a friction primer which she was
trying to remove from the board or form in which it was placed and that in doing
so she had rapped the end of the board against the table," the investigators
Lizzie Dawson, interviewed while a hospital patient, said she was seated at
the same table as Mary Ryan and was breaking up cartridges. From about three
feet away, she saw her strike the board against - another board. She said she
was positive about the cause of the explosion.
Another of the injured, Mary Cordle, had just emptied a box of powder when
the explosion occurred. She said she had seen Mary Ryan previously rapping the
board containing primers against the work bench,
Overall, the report indicated many safety precautions were adhered to in the
laboratory and that Captain Smith and others made frequent inspections of the
shops. But witnesses said they had seen Mary Ryan strike the board containing
friction primers on work benches before. The question remained as to why this
practice had not been halted.
Richmond rallied to assist the stricken. The city’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, asked
the Young Men’s Christian Association to aid in raising funds for the relief of
the sufferers and their families. A committee was appointed to solicit
contributions, and employees of the Richmond Arsenal and Laboratory pitched in.
And the proprietors of two Richmond theaters donated the proceeds of a night’s
entertainment to the cause.
Although no record apparently exists of the amount of donations, Richmonders
Gorgas’ wife was active. "Mamma has been untiring in aiding, visiting and
relieving these poor sufferers and has fatigued herself very much," he confided
in his diary. "She has done an infinite deal of good to these poor people."
Arms-bearing men were touched. Prompted by the mayor’s appeal to Richmonders,
one soldier wrote to the Richmond Sentinel. "A non-resident of the city,
I beg to appeal to all humane people in the city and the State, to contribute to
so laudable a purpose. The poor wounded creatures are young females who were
dependent on their daily labor for their support. I send you five dollars and am
only sorry I cannot afford more."
The Sentinel turned the donation over to the mayor and welcomed
For several weeks, reminders of the calamity cropped up. On April 10, Martha
Clemmons, age 25, who was injured in the explosion and then caught smallpox, was
buried. The next day, the body of the missing laboratory employee, Miss Burley,
was pulled from the James River and turned over to friends for burial.
Ironically, the laboratory had enjoyed a good reputation for safety before
the explosion. In early January 1863, the Richmond Enquirer had reported
on a tour of the laboratory departments and given a glimpse of the history of
Captain Smith had founded the laboratory after his arrival in Richmond in
early 1861. He had employed a small number of workers, trained them and, as
necessary, hired others.
Initially, the laboratory operated in tobacco factory buildings near the
James. Later, Brown’s Island had been cleared and the needed buildings were
constructed. There, in departments occupied by the females, cartridges, fuses,
percussion caps, primers, and rockets were turned out. It was estimated these
girls, nine to twenty years old, made an average of 1,200 cartridges per day.
Addressing the issue of safety, the Enquirer reported: "Very few
accidents have occurred at the Laboratory since its establishment — much fewer,
indeed, than might reasonably have been expected where so many raw hands have
been recently employed. The establishment has been of inestimable service. . . .
It is the general ordnance manufactory of the South."
The laboratory continued to serve the Confederate cause. And although the
nearby arsenal, armory, and laboratory at Seventh and Canal streets burned in
the evacuation fire of April 2 and 3, 1865, at least some of the Brown’s Island
buildings survived to face an uncertain future in a fallen capital. But in late
May 1863, those events were imponderable. By that time the laboratory was back
in full operation, the destroyed works replaced, and numerous additions and
safeguards implemented. The improvements made accidents almost impossible
without great carelessness.
Reporting on the new arrangements a writer in the Examiner indulged in
patriotic fancy. "Embowered in the deep shade of Brown’s Island, with its busy
colony of female operatives the laboratory works are well worthy a visit. Here
the delicate hands of the southern maiden put up the little packet of powder and
bullet, the thicker finger and unerring aim of the southern soldier sends on its
mission of death into the breast and brain of the invader."
"Among the names of the dead, it will be seen, is that of Rev. John H.
Woodcock, a most worthy and exemplary citizen of Richmond."
With those words, - the Richmond Whig informed its readers of the death of
the best-known victim of the Confederate States Laboratory explosion on Brown’s
Mr. Woodcock, 63, a former teacher in a Richmond school, was in charge of the
room in which the explosion occurred. Initially, he was not believed to have
been wounded fatally, but his condition worsened rapidly the night of the
explosion. He died early the next morning.
Aside from Mr. Woodcock and Mary Ryan, the 18-year-old girl to whose
carelessness the explosion was attributed, little is known about the victims.
In fact, the list of dead appears to resemble more closely the results of a
school accident than of an explosion in a facility that produced the ammunition
Mr. Woodcock and Miss Ryan are buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, in
which such Confederate luminaries as President Jefferson Davis, Generals J.E.B.
Stuart, Fitzhugh Lee, and J.H. Morgan, and Secretary of War James A. Seddon were
Other explosion victims buried in Hollywood are Mary Blessingham, 23; Eliza
Willis, 10; Elizabeth Young, 33; Mary Archer, 12; Sarah Haney, age unknown;
Annie Peddicord, age unknown; Marannie Garnett, 13;. Barbara A. Jackson, 16;
Sarah Marshall, 67; Robert S. Chaple, 15; Elizabeth S. Moore, 15; Delia Clemens,
20; and Sarah Foster, 14. Total victims in Hollywood, 15.
In Shockoe, another of Richmond’s historic cemeteries, are buried these
explosion victims: Alice Johnson, 12;, Mary E. Valentine 14; Margaret Drustly,
16; Wilhelmina Defenback, 15; Mary Zerhum, 12; Anne E. Bolton, 14; Nannie Horan,
14; Virginia A. Mayer, 12; Virginia E. Page, 13; Mary Ellen Wallace, 12; Emma
Virginia Blankenship; 15; Margaret Alexander. 15; Caroline Zietenheimer, 16; and
Martha Clemmons, 25. Total victims there, 14, and possibly more. These cemetery
records are not clear.
In Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond is buried James G. Currie, a young boy killed
in the explosion.
Besides these, newspapers reported that the following persons were killed or
injured fatally in the explosion: Mary O’Brien, Martha Burley (whose body was
found in the James River), Martha Daly, Mrs. Ann Dodson, Julia A. Brannan, Mary
Bowlin, Catherine McCarthy, Mary Zinginham, Mary Whitehurst, Maria Brien, Ella
Smith, Annie Davis, Mary Cushing, Louisa Ricely, Ellen Sullivan, and Mary
A number of these victims probably were buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in
Richmond. Also known as Bishop’s - Cemetery, St. Joseph’s was the burial place
for Catholics in Richmond from 1858 until 1897, but the whereabouts of the
burial records are unknown, according to officials of the Catholic Diocese of
The total of dead used in the accompanying article—at least forty five—is
based on newspaper articles and cemetery records and the official report of the
investigation of the explosion. The report said forty-three persons had died,
but at least two deaths occurred or were reported after the date of the report.
That document does not list the killed and injured.
In cases of conflicting spellings of names between newspaper articles and
cemetery records, the latter were given preference.
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