AETNA POWDER PLANT ACCIDENT DEBUNKED
POST-TRIBUNE
BY: LISA DeNEAL
The Aetna Powder Co. was a central part of the lives of residents during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Established in 1881, the factory made explosives for Midwest farmers to use in clearing their fields of tree stumps and large rocks.
Seeking the “most desolate and uninhabitable spot in the central west,” the company was developed on an 800-acre tract, with high sand dunes protecting the 26 buildings, and their workers, from explosions.
The location was considered ideal, according to the June 3, 1956, Jubilee Edition of The Post-Tribune. To the north was Lake Michigan, to the west was Chicago, to the east Michigan City, to the south, only sand.
Hammond, Whiting and East Chicago were small villages, and the founding of Gary was more than 25 years away.
The employees were mostly men who lived close to the company. The presence of the plant, with its periodic explosions, hindered community development.
Verlaine Wright of Valparaiso said she learned that her great-grandmother, Carol Hasselgren, was one of the first women to work in the powder factory.
“Before she became the first woman boss at the factory, she made shells to pack the dynamite in,” said Wright, adding that Hasselgren's husband, Hoken, also worked there. “And my grandfather, Andrew Lindstrom, worked at the Aetna Powder Co. in either 1901 or 1902 after emigrating from Sweden.”
But when Gary was founded, Aetna realized it had become part of “civilization.” To prevent its annexation by the new city, which could oust the powder plant, 600 acres of the site was incorporated as the town of Aetna in 1907.
However, the Aetna Powder Co. was prone to explosions. One year before the company shut down for good in 1918, half of Aetna Powder Co. was destroyed in a fire that led to an investigation of a plot that the fire was “the work of German agents (during World War I).”
At that time, the plant's mission was changed to help the war effort. Aetna Powder could turn out “from 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of the highest explosives known for American and her allies,” The Gary Daily Tribune reported in 1917.
But on Aug. 11 that year, the headline was “Aetna Powder Co. Half Destroyed.” The article reported that two men, J.E. Holt and Earl Krueger, were arrested in connection with a fire at midnight that wiped out the production side of the plant. The article said that according to police, the two men were German agents. Holt and Krueger were “believed to be of German descent.”
No deaths or injuries were reported in the blaze, but a plot was suspected because of where the fire started — in a bin holding about 6,000 pounds of dry, raw cotton.
“Moreover, the appearance of a strategic plan is given to the fact that the cotton was certain to start an instantaneous and rapidly spreading fire,” the article stated.
In subsequent days, the newspaper reported that Holt and Krueger were released and not charged. But a third suspect, Aetna Powder Co. employee Otto Eichoff, was arrested after police and federal agents discovered he was the last man to leave the bin after it was filled with cotton before the fire.
Despite all the damage, and due to the war effort, the Aetna plant was rebuilt within three weeks.
Henry Cook, 74, of Hobart said he was born in the Miller section of Gary in 1931 and lived there until he moved to Hobart in 1967. Cook said as a child, he was told stories of three explosions that occurred before the spectacular fire at Aetna Powder Co.
Cook said he heard from people over the years that the cause of the 1917 fire was steel taps on someone's shoes.
“Rumor was that one individual who had steel heel taps on their shoes was walking through the plant and the scuffs against the ground caused a spark that started the fire,” said Cook, chuckling. “Now, that was considered a suitable explanation to many. But it sounded like an urban legend.”
Cook said Charles Johnson, son of John V. and Johanna Johnson, owned the two acres of land that later became the Miller Cemetery.
“Charles was 30 at the time and worked at a horse stable in the area,” Cook said. “He told me that three plots were dug to bury the remains of workers killed in explosions at the plant, and those remains were in the Miller Cemetery.”
For years, people talked about the fire as an explosion that killed 100 workers at the company. Recently, members of Bethel Lutheran Church placed a marker at Bethel Lutheran (Miller) Cemetery, in memory of those thought killed in 1917. It is said their bodies are buried in a mass grave in the cemetery.
Although the 1917 fire recorded no known deaths, the explosions that took place at the plant in April 1888, November 1912 and November 1914 resulted in fatalities. All the bodies from those incidents are recorded as buried in the cemetery.
Samuel E. Brownsten, a former Lake County surveyor and a Valparaiso University graduate, took the job as chief construction engineer at the Aetna Powder Co. in 1914. In 1956, Brownsten recalled for The Post-Tribune his job and the precautions taken.
He said during those early years, the gun-cotton was washed with the water from the sloughs that were so abundant in the area. He feared that some particles of the nitrated cotton would get through, becoming a large mass. Brownsten worried some explosions might be caused from the heat of the sun or a careless smoker, but the chief chemist believed the material would deteriorate to such an extent it would never explode.
Some 40 years later, children found some layers of the gun-cotton among the dunes and put matches to it. It exploded, injuring two.
After World War I, the plant closed for good. The Aetna Powder Co. deeded the property to Aetna Iron and Steel Co. on Dec. 1, 1919. The Bankers Trust Co. acquired the title by court foreclosure in January 1922. The Aetna Securities Co. acquired the land by deed on June 17, 1926. The first subdivision was recorded Aug. 5, 1926.
