Summary
Summer 1864 in Washington was deathly hot. In the blistering June sun, the superintendent of the Washington Arsenal, Thomas B. Brown, thoughtlessly set out to dry three pans of his special "Red Star" signal flare pellets in a little-used space behind a former storage building. These fireworks and his carelessness would kill 21 young women.
In coming and going, Brown would have crossed paths with some of the 104 hoop-skirted women and teenage girls who worked in the arsenal's "laboratory" making cartridges for the Union Army.See the full content of this document
Extract
Tragedy at City's Arsenal ; Explosion Kills 21 Women
Because the aggressive armies of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Phillip Sheridan were firing cartridges as fast as Rebel targets could be sighted, arsenal officials recently had expanded its output by converting that old storage facility into a cartridge production center.
The cartridges the sons of Northern dairy farmers fired with de...See the full content of this document
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