Around 2 p.m. on September 17, 1862, a series of powerful explosions ripped through the U.S. Army Arsenal in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, just as many of the girls working there had left their benches to collect their wages. Residents of Allegheny and nearby Pittsburgh, many of whom had become aware of a major battle taking place that day at Antietam Creek in Maryland, braced for what they believed was a Confederate invasion. People who crowded into the streets after the blasts followed a column of smoke that rose from the burning buildings and found what the Pittsburgh Gazette called "an appalling sight." The roof of the building where young women and girls worked assembling cartridges had collapsed, and flames enveloped its remains. Powerful blasts caused by exploding barrels of gunpowder had blown out the windows and doors of surrounding buildings.

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Eyewitnesses described a ghastly scene. Terrified girls ran screaming from the building with their clothes on fire, their faces blackened and unrecognizable. Some jumped from the windows, while others were trampled under foot by panic-stricken workers. Many of the witnesses tried to help the victims, who pleaded with onlookers to tear the burning clothes from their bodies. Mary Jane Black was just returning to her post after picking up her pay when she heard screams and, turning in the direction of the sound, saw "two girls behind me; they were on fire; their faces were burning and blood running from them. I pulled the clothes off one of them; while I was doing this, the other one ran up and begged me to cover her."

Onlookers discovered remains riddled by shells, cartridges and Minié balls. Bodies as well as stray limbs, bones and scraps of clothing were found hundreds of feet from the explosion—on the streets, in the Allegheny River and suspended in the trees that lined the arsenal grounds. Newspaper reporters searched for words to describe the pitiful remains of the victims:

In some places [bodies] lay in heaps, and burnt as rapidly as pine wood, until the flames were extinguished by the firemen. In other places nothing could be seen but the whitened and consuming bones, the intensity of the heat having consumed every particle of flesh. The steel bands remaining from the hoop skirts of the unfortunate girls, marked the place where many of them had perished.

In a macabre postscript, the Gazette noted that "curiosity hunters" had carried away human remains as souvenirs of the blast. Initial reports underestimated the death toll, putting it at 39; more than a year later, townspeople confirmed that 78 people, mostly women and young girls, had actually died in the accident. The remains of most were never identified, but the majority of the victims were young. Some may have been African Americans.

The coroner began investigating the cause of the disaster and convened a jury to hear testimony from survivors and witnesses. On September 27, just 10 days after the incident, the coroner issued a damning verdict. He found three officers and two civilians in charge of the ar­senal guilty of "gross negligence" and demanded that the U.S. Army take measures "to ensure the safety of the lives and property of our people from a calamity far more destructive and appalling than has yet befallen us." Since he had no authority to compel the Army to act, however, the verdict expressed civilian concerns about the arsenal rather than making a realistic demand that the Army change its operating procedures.

By 1862 the U.S. Army regularly employed women and young girls to make cartridges at a number of arsenals situ­ated in urban areas in the North. The work fell outside what middle-class Americans considered appropriate for women. Newspaper articles about the "appalling disaster" in Pennsylvania, as well as the coroner's condemnation of the Army's failure to protect the females in its employ, voiced concern about the fact that women's lives had been put at risk in this fashion. Although the work was both dirty and dangerous, there is no evidence to suggest that the women themselves were actually reluctant to do the work. In fact there were always more women seeking work than positions available in the arsenals.

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