Indianapolis has many sister cities, Chicago, Louisville and Cincinnati principal among them. Kings Island amusement park is a one tank trip that most Hoosiers have taken in their lifetime. But most visitors don’t realize that the park is haunted. More still have no idea that upon pulling into the north end of the Kings Island parking lot off Columbia Road, you’re within a stone’s throw of an 1840s pioneer cemetery within the boundaries of the amusement park. What’s more, fewer still realize that the park’s property includes the site of a horrific gunpowder explosion that claimed the lives of 11 men, women and children in July of 1890.
Within sight of the Kings Island roller coasters along the Little Miami River, just down the hill from Kings Mills, the old Peters Cartridge factory looms ominously. It is empty and dilapidated now, broken windows and “No Trespassing” signs the only evidence that anyone still cares about the majestic old building today. Deep inside the maze of buildings however, there is life remaining in the form of about 20 small business tenants including photographers, salvage operators, a motorcycle repair shop, a whistle manufacturer and a theater group. Today the place is quiet and peaceful; a stark contrast to a century ago, when the bustling factory was one of the most prolific and innovative makers of ammunition in the world. It employed hundreds of people along the scenic river.
The complex, built in the 1880s, has a colorful history based on revenge. Joseph Warren King and his nephew Ahimaaz King owned a large portion of the Miami Powder Co., near Xenia. The Kings were forced out of the company after an out-of-state powder maker wrested control of the business from them in 1872 in what we call today a hostile takeover. Undeterred, the crafty, vengeful Kings hatched a plan to buy 832,000 pounds of surplus Civil War gunpowder from an armory in St. Louis. J.W. King intended to drive his nemesis out of business with cheap powder at a time when a flooded post-war market made the explosive stuff inexpensive already.
In 1878, the Kings created the Great Western Powder Co. and chose the spot for their factory in a deep valley of the Little Miami River 30 miles south of Xenia at Gainesborough, where Kings Island stands today. The choice of this site was no accident. In the early days of explosives manufacturing, the willow tree played a prominent part in the manufacture of gunpowder. The manufacture of gunpowder required saltpeter, soda ash and charcoal. The banks of most every stream in the area abounded with willow trees. These trees could be used to produce the special high grade of charcoal necessary to manufacture explosives.
Nature had been especially lavish in providing willow trees along the banks of the Little Miami. Today they can still be found in vast numbers, yet nothing like those years when the powder mills were active there. They would soon build Kings Mills, a company town for their workers, and rename the operation the King Powder Co. J.W. King’s son-in-law, a Baptist preacher named Gershom Moore Peters, founded the Peters Cartridge Co. in 1887. Peters invented a revolutionary machine that automatically loaded shotgun shells, capable of packing and loading shells at a rate of 60 per minute. The Peters Cartridge Co. became the first to commercially produce automatic machine-loaded cartridges for the marketplace and the King Powder Co. was the parent company.
The massive factory occupied both sides of the river. Safety was the watchword at the twin factories, where at least 20 known explosions killed dozens of people. Workhorses wore brass horseshoes, for fear of deadly sparks. Something as simple as a nail in a worn shoe heel coming in contact with a nail in the floor might cause a spark to touch off an explosion powerful enough to blow a man to smithereens. One former employee spoke of the victim in one of these explosions (who had failed to wear the required thick wool sock over his shoes in the powder room): “We didn’t find enough of him to make a bait for a crawfish.” Explosions were so routine that most structures were built for “quick post-explosion reconstruction.”
Only one-third of the original buildings still stand, comprising 300,000 square feet of mostly storage space. During it’s heyday, celebrities like “Little Miss Sure Shot” Annie Oakley visited here. The complex has been used for a couple movies, a rap video, three or four album covers and many TV commercials. But the most noteworthy event commenced at 3:50 p.m. on July 15, 1890 when people 6 miles away in Lebanon, Ohio were startled by a loud boom.
A freight train halted at Kings Mills to pick up a couple of cars loaded with giant blasting powder. The engineer “cut” his train and proceeded to draw the cars from the switch alongside the mills and place them in his “string.” He made what, in railroad parlance, is known as a “running switch,” having located a new brakeman to operate the brakes. For some unknown reason, the brakes on the cars did not hold and the wayward train cars slipped their moorings. The runaway train gained speed as it hurtled down the slope, striking the stationary cars loaded with 1,600 kegs of powder and cartridges with disastrous results. Instantly there was an explosion that burst the eardrums of every one in the immediate vicinity followed by a second concussion and later a third, more deafening report.
The explosion killed 11 people, including three children. The resulting fires burned for five hours and destroyed an office building, two three-story buildings, a large warehouse and almost 12 company homes. Luckily, a warehouse containing 25,000 kegs of gun powder was left untouched — not a spark had reached it. A Cincinnati reporter said of the blast, “Everything … took fire and burnt like powder, not a piece of timber of any kind (and all the buildings) was left standing by six o’clock.” One 6-year old witness, Timmy Dowdell said, “I was playing under an apple tree with two other boys on the opposite side of the main office building when it happened. After the explosion, everything got dark and all of the apples fell on top of us.”
One newspaper account said of the explosion: “Employees at the powder mills had been on duty almost three hours when, without an instant’s warning, and as swiftly as lightning strikes from the sky, there was a roar as though the earth itself had been split asunder. Wherever they were standing, whether at the grinding machines, in the storage houses or even idling along the streets, men felt the earth give beneath their feet and then, seemingly, to rise as though in the throes of a violent earthquake. Some were thrown against nearby obstacles; others were swept from their feet and hurled to the ground.”
Debris rained from the sky; splintered wood, pieces of metal, shingles and bricks came down on the single street in the settlement, and showered the roofs of the company-owned cottages. Several large shade trees near the building were literally torn up by the roots, while others nearby were broken or twisted off near their base; still others, some fully 50 yards away, were stripped of their branches by the force of the explosion. One side of the bridge across the Little Miami river, nearly a mile away, collapsed and tumbled into the water below. Immediately following the explosion a cloud of thick, dark smoke hung over the little valley. For a full half-hour the cloud blacked out the sky.
The work of checking over the list of employees started as soon as the numbed and frightened populace could recover from the shock. As names were called the men lined up, most of them nursing bruises or cuts received from the flying debris. When the roll had been completed three vacancies were noted in their ranks. But there was not even the tiniest fragment of clothing of any one of the missing three to indicate that they were actual victims of the tragedy. They had literally been blown to atoms. A careful search was started in the afternoon, and small fragments of the bodies of the explosion victims were found, mostly at a distance of 200 yards from the scene of the catastrophe. Only small portions of each victim were recovered, but sufficient to establish identity in each instance. The fragments, consisting of parts of legs and arms, were placed in three boxed and buried in separate graves.
Not a trace of the brakeman could be found following the explosion and the freight cars on which he was riding had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened up and swallowed them whole. Fifty girls were at work in the cartridge loading plant. They watched as the walls of the building cracked and split from the concussion. All but 20 of them got out of the building but they all survived, albeit with cuts, bruises and broken bones as remembrances.
Among the names of the 11 that perished: brakeman William Franey, Albert Williams, a cartridge maker; Samuel Stevenson and Harry Reynolds, teamsters; Mrs. James Moss and her 3-year old child; Mrs. Frederick Kelly, wife of the foreman of the plant, and her 4-year old son; a Mrs. Collins and child; the infant of a Mrs. Eliston, and a rag-picker, whose identity is known only to God.
Kings Mills buried its dead, then mutely turned its face to the scene of destruction to fix and repair the factory. The plant continued to make ammunition for soldiers during World War I. Peters Cartridge Co. was sold to Remington Arms in 1934. Roll a Remington Arms brass ammunition round in your hand and read the “R-P.” The “P” stands for Peters Cartridge Co. Remington continued to operate the plant into World War II, producing an estimated 50 million rounds per month. Many of the King Powder Co. buildings were burned to the ground after the company’s closing due to the dangerously explosive residue. Columbia Records pressed records at the plant until 1948. Seagram’s bought the facility in 1950, using it as a whiskey warehouse for 18 years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the old factory is said to be haunted, but that’s another story.
Today, there is little left of the factories of King and Peters company. What remains of the once massive cartridge factory today rises like a ghost in the woods above the Little Miami River gorge across a narrow bridge from Kings Mills. Soaring above the complex is a 220-foot shot tower emblazoned with a stylized “P.” Molten lead was once dropped through a copper sieve at the top of the tower. In the descent, surface tension molded the lead into small spheres before the soft metal splashed into water at the tower’s bottom that hardened the globules into shotgun pellets. Now the once state-of-the-art shot tower is home to feral cats in place of factory workers. The occasional dog appears in the broken factory windows like a phantom, guarding its territory and the relics of a time when shot was King.
Sure, the ghosts of Kings Island could comprise any number of personages; long dead guests returning to spend eternity in the place they considered a second home, perhaps guests who died untimely deaths within the confines of the spot they considered to be the happiest place on earth, or maybe long dead workers in soot covered, smoking coveralls with gunpowder and lead residue embedded forever under their fingernails, puzzled at the marvels of what must seem like a strange new world to their Victorian Era eyes. So the next time you visit Kings Island, know that you’re straying into the world of Peters and King. In fact, one of the company’s powder lines was located a mere stone’s throw from the park’s Eiffel Tower centerpiece. Just be careful when you enter the dark corners of the Kings Island amusement park. You may just find that you are not alone.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
