On May 10, 2023, I attended a history tour at Shockoe Hill Cemetery. I was excited because Bert Dunkerly, a historian, author, and National Park Ranger was the guide and because of the topic—the Brown’s Island Disaster. On Friday, March 13, 1863- Friday the 13th- the Confederate Laboratory, a munitions manufacturing facility on Brown’s Island that produced much of the ammunition for the Confederacy, and which employed about 300 women and girls, exploded. The Richmond Whig reported that “the force of the explosion demolished about fifty feet of the house, the sides being blown out and the roof falling…”[I]
Dunkerly’s tour explicitly focused on the fourteen young girls who were victims of the 1863 explosion who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. This was the first time Dunkerly gave the tour and I was looking forward to hearing their stories.
The Laboratory employed about 300 women and girls. They were working class people hoping to make a dollar to two dollars per day by producing small arms cartridges and artillery ammunition. The location of the disaster was a structure that held a variety of activities, including breaking open cartridges to be reused, and filling new cartridges. As Dunkerly explained, there was loose powder everywhere and these activities should have been done in the same space.
One teenager, Mary Ryan, an Irish immigrant who “was known for being careless” and had been corrected prior to the disaster, was working with friction primers that were used to ignite the powder charges in ammunition. While Ryan was working with the primers, one became stuck; she banged the wooden block to dislodge it.
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| Richmond Whig, March 14, 1863. |
I grew up about twenty miles from Brown’s Island but the explosion wasn’t something that I was taught in school. I don’t recall learning anything about it until adulthood perhaps because it involved many young women including those as young as 10 and they were mostly German and Irish immigrants. The tour was held nearly 160 years and two months after one of the worst manufacturing accidents of the Civil War in the South and unfortunately, it was poorly attended. I point this out for a reason that I will explain later.
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| Alice Johnson, 12 |
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| Blankenship, Richmond Dispatch, March 20, 1863 |
Dunkerly’s tour explicitly focused on the fourteen young girls who were victims of the 1863 explosion who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. This was the first time Dunkerly gave the tour and I was looking forward to hearing their stories.
The Laboratory employed about 300 women and girls. They were working class people hoping to make a dollar to two dollars per day by producing small arms cartridges and artillery ammunition. The location of the disaster was a structure that held a variety of activities, including breaking open cartridges to be reused, and filling new cartridges. As Dunkerly explained, there was loose powder everywhere and these activities should have been done in the same space.
One teenager, Mary Ryan, an Irish immigrant who “was known for being careless” and had been corrected prior to the disaster, was working with friction primers that were used to ignite the powder charges in ammunition. While Ryan was working with the primers, one became stuck; she banged the wooden block to dislodge
it.
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Richmonders rushed to the scene only to be met by victims who were seriously wounded from burns, lacerations, and blunt force trauma. The wounded were taken to General Hospital #2 that had been the former tobacco factory of S. W. Bailey and Company.
I can only imagine how overwhelmed the families must have felt. And while there were advertisements in the newspapers and Richmonders donated funds to help with the costs of the injured, burials began immediately with several of the victims being interred on the same day.
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| Virginia Page, Richmond Dispatch, March 16, 1863. |
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| Mary Valentine, 14, and Margaret Drustly, 16 |
Martha Clemmons, 25, and Margaret Alexander, 14 |
Virginia Mayer, 12, and Wilhelmina Defenbach, 15 |
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| Nannie Horan, 14 |
My photos of the graves of Mary Ellen Wallace, 12 and Anne E. Bolton, 14 did not turn out but I plan to return to visit these girls .
One poignant moment of the tour was when Dunkerly shared how with so many war-related memories happening, this disaster did not continue to make the newspapers. His research could not find mention of the first or tenth anniversaries being recognized with wreath-laying ceremonies or even tributes in the paper. With so many lives affected by the explosion, it's unlikely the tragedy was forgotten by those close to the victims. A low tour turnout reinforced the message of these girls being forgotten. I'm so appreciative of researchers like Dunkerly and the Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery for working to keep their stories alive.
