Tanya Anderson - Gunpowder Girls: The True Stories of Three Civil War Tragedies

My sister and I walked to work from our home at Penn Avenue and Seventeenth Street that morning as usual. It was payday. The morning passed quickly. We did not stop for lunch at 12 oclock on account of the rush. []

At 2 oclock another girl and I were the only persons in Room 13. Suddenly there was a terrific roar; the earth seemed to split apart. The girl with me jumped through a window and I followed her, alighting on top of her in some grass behind the building. I lifted her to her feet and we started to run towards Butler Street. As we ran, there was a second explosion, and before we reached the street a third one.

Looking around we saw the building we had just left being torn to pieces. My sister escaped in some manner. She has never been able to tell just how. I was a nervous wreck for several weeks, and so terribly shocked that night that I had to be held in bed by force. 1

Mary McCandless McGraw, who was 13 years old when the Allegheny Arsenal explosion occurred.

The summers heat and humidity lingered in the dawning hours of Wednesday, September 17, 1862. Dozens of women and girls of Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, tied on their bonnets, picked up their dinner bundles, and set out for another day of work at the nearby Allegheny Arsenal. (What people called dinner back then, we would call lunch today.) They looked forward to picking up their monthly pay during their midday break, but that was still six or seven hours away.

Some of the girls lived close to the arsenal, but not as close as the officers and the other men who worked there. The men lived in the barracks on 39th Street, a part of the arsenal complex, which stretched from the Allegheny River to the north to Penn Avenue on the south. Most of the female workers had a long trek each daytwenty blocks or moreleaving before dawn and returning home after dark, especially during the winter when hours of daylight are short.

As they encountered coworkers along the way, the girls made small talk, many with a strong Irish brogue or German accent, and also shared news about the most recent events of the war. Pennsylvanians had reason to pay attention. The Confederate Army wasnt far away. News of General Robert E. Lees invasion of the North had folks in Maryland and Pennsylvania seized with fear. Rumors of Rebel behaviorstealing property, destroying homes, attacking women and childrenmight have been exaggerated, but how was anyone to know for sure? Many of Pittsburghs women had no men at home, no men to protect them, and no men to provide a steady, adequate income.

Catherine Foley, a 37-year-old widow, had no one to count on except herself and her 20-year-old daughter Margaret. The two of them shared a home with an older woman named Ann McShafer, just down the street from the Allegheny Arsenal. Catherine was probably raised to believe in the ideal of the true woman, someone who was a good wife, mother, and homemaker. In both the North and South, a true woman knew her placeand it was at home. But Catherine lost the advantages of that kind of life when her husband died, sometime before 1860. For the first time, Catherine had to step outside her home into the world of work to earn her own money. She had few options for doing respectable work. Some of the ladies in the lower-income neighborhoods like Catherines worked as prostitutes, making enough money to earn a steady income. They also earned the shame-laden disapproval of other women.