The 1874 Reed Run Nitroglycerin Disaster

On December 23, 1874, a terrible explosion in the hills above the Susquehanna killed Philip Cramer and his sons James and John in what was, at the time, one of the most gruesome accidents recorded in the history of southern Lancaster County. Newspapers described it in blunt, horrifying detail. Two bodies were blown to pieces. Bits of bone and flesh were scattered far from the blast site. The third son, somehow still alive after the massive explosion, dragged himself into a nearby shed before dying of his injuries.

The accident happened near the mouth of Reed Run, just north of the ridge that separates it from Tucquan Glen. In 1874, that rough, wooded landscape was owned by Thomas Stewart. The strip along the Susquehanna River below Stewart’s farm was then an active construction zone for the Columbia and Port Deposit Railroad, where dangerous blasting materials were being used to carve the line through the river hills.

Philip Cramer was not an anonymous victim in a forgotten newspaper item. He was a husband, father, farmer, laborer, and Civil War veteran. Born in January 1823, he had served as a private in Company D of the 2nd Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War before returning home to the river hills. Later accounts identify him as a collier, one of the men who cut wood and burned it into charcoal for use by local iron furnaces. He was married to Ellen Duffy and had a large family. By the winter of 1874, he was approaching his fifty-second birthday.

His sons, James Henry and John, were young. Contemporary newspapers listed their ages as in their early twenties, though later family accounts suggest they may have been much younger, perhaps 18 and 13, respectively.

However old they were, the papers agreed on one point. On that December day, father and sons went out together and never came home. According to the Lancaster Intelligencer, the trio was cutting wood for the family’s charcoal-burning work in the nearby Tucquan Glen area. By noon, or shortly after, something had gone catastrophically wrong.

Railroad workers had apparently left a ninety-six-pound can of nitroglycerin in the area. The explosive was commonly used for blasting rock during railroad construction. One account suggested the can may have frozen in the late December cold and was believed to be even more dangerous in that condition. Nitroglycerin was already notoriously unstable, and rough handling, crushing, or a sharp blow could trigger disaster when frozen.

When the Cramers failed to return home for dinner, relatives set out to find them. What they found was a scene of devastation. The force of the explosion had torn apart Philip and one of his sons. The other son had made it as far as a shed, where he collapsed and died. Nearby, the blast had ripped open the earth so violently that one paper claimed the hole was large enough for a four-horse team to stand in without being seen. Trees and shrubbery around the spot were shattered.

The newspapers offered several theories as to how the explosion happened. One possibility was that Philip and one of his sons had tried to move the can to a safer location and triggered it in the process. Another was that they never touched it directly. Instead, while cutting wood, the limb of a falling tree, or even a flying wood chip, may have struck the can and set it off. A later family tradition preserved yet another variation, claiming the men had agreed to move the nitroglycerin for pay and were killed when something went wrong during the attempt.

In the end, the most honest answer is the one the 1874 papers themselves gave. No one knew for certain, and probably no one ever would.

Deputy Coroner U.S. Clark held an inquest, and the jury concluded that Philip Cramer, John Cramer, and James Henry Cramer had come to their deaths through the accidental explosion of a can of nitroglycerin left on the Stewart farm along the railroad line. That verdict closed the legal question, but it did little to soften the human horror of what had happened. A father and two sons had left home on an ordinary December morning and were destroyed in an instant by industrial explosives abandoned in the woods.

The crater from the explosion still existed as recently as 2016, when a group of family members visited the site. The hole, softened by the passage of nearly 150 years, was fronted by ferns, backed by a steep cliff, and surrounded by deciduous forest.

Today, hikers can pass through those same woods on the Conestoga Trail with little sense of what happened there in the final days before Christmas in 1874. If the likely location is correct, the old blast site lies in or very near what is now Lancaster Conservancy’s Clark Nature Preserve.

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Go Deeper

Take an even deeper dive into the story with the Uncharted Lancaster Podcast in this Season 2 episode about the 1874 Reed Run Nitroglycerin Disaster.

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Resources

• Lancaster Daily Intelligencer December 24, 1874
• The Daily Evening Express December 24, 1874
• Lancaster Examiner and The Semi-Weekly New Era December 30, 1874
• Lancaster Intelligencer December 30, 1874
• Returning to the scene of a dreadful catastrophe
• Philip Cramer Find a Grave