Apple Butter and Giant Powder: A Smokehouse Stove Explodes Near Spokane
A woman and a little girl lit a fire to make preserves — not knowing the stove was packed with sticks of blasting powder.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
SPOKANE, Aug. 26. — [Special.] — The wife of Lloyd Lyons and a little daughter of Frank Lyons were blown up by a giant powder explosion today at 2 p.m., at the farm of Dr. Lyons, six miles southwest of this place. Mrs. Lyons and the little girl went to the smokehouse and set up a stove in one corner, in which five or six sticks of giant powder were stored. The lady made a fire in the stove intending to make apple butter. She and the little girl were sitting by the stove when the powder exploded with terrific force, tearing the house to atoms. Mrs. Lyons was horribly cut by the pieces of the stove, and both eyeballs seemed to have been burst by the concussion. The little girl received a deep cut on one leg. It is thought that Mrs. Lyons will live, but she will probably lose her eyesight.
“She and the little girl were sitting by the stove when the powder exploded with terrific force, tearing the house to atoms.”
Farm accidents with stored blasting powder were a grim fact of frontier life, when giant powder sat in the same outbuilding as the butter churn. The story survives as a small, chilling window into how thin the margin for error was for rural families a century before modern safety regulation.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.