November 1894 was a great time for blowing up things in Knox County

DANVILLE — One of the best things about studying the history of our local area is that the past was a better time: an age of calmness and common sense, without extremists running around blowing up drugstores with dynamite.

Well, except that one time.

According to the November 8, 1894, issue of the Democratic Banner, the Workman family was prominent in the three-in-one metropolis of Danville/Buckeye City/Rossville, located in Knox County’s Union Township.

One building owned by A.R. Workman was in the middle of the village, near the railroad tracks.

In 1894, a dressmaker, Miss Durbin, had her shop in one side of the structure, but the other was up for rent. An entrepreneur approached Workman and inquired about renting the empty shopfront in order to operate a drugstore. Workman thought it sounded like a good project.

So far, so good. But it must be understood that in this period of American history, there was a fierce debate between traditionalists, who enjoyed a drink every now and then, and intensely driven moral reformers who felt that alcohol was poisoning everything great about the nation.

These people, known as the Temperance movement, had started as a movement to “temper” the use of alcohol by restricting it, but had grown more extreme by this period, demanding an outright ban on any alcoholic drinks.

The Temperance movement had already struck memorably in Fredericktown in 1879, when a group of female Temperance activists took over two saloons and broke all the bottles of liquor and used hatchets to rupture kegs of beer, resulting in national news coverage.

Those ladies’ activities had led to a ban against alcohol in Fredericktown in 1887, and the Danville trio of villages had followed soon after.

A national ban did not fall into place until 1920, and it proved so spectacularly disastrous that it largely killed the Temperance movement when it was repealed in 1933.

Though no one was ever able to figure out how the rumor mill got cranked up in 1894, a rumor began to spread throughout Buckeye City and its adjoining settlements that this proposed drugstore was actually going to be a front for a speakeasy operation that would secretly provide and sell alcohol in its basement.

Mind you, no one ever offered the slightest bit of proof that some such plan was underway, they just repeated the rumor, growing more and more outraged with every repetition.

Local Temperance fanatics — and make no mistake, this is domestic terrorism — finally decided that it was so dreadfully important to prevent the flow of alcohol in the Danville area, that they would be morally justified in blowing up the building.

Late one night near the end of October in 1894, the conspirators packed dynamite and/or gunpowder around the base of the building, and set it off.

The resulting detonation wrecked most of the building, and woke up everyone in Rossville/Buckeye City/Danville with its cacophony.

When Miss Durbin examined the contents of her millinery shop the following morning, she concluded that the entire contents of her store, including inventory, had been ruined.

Though inquiries were made, and the county commissioners announced a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators, the mysterious explosion was never solved.

OK, so perhaps there was the occasional insane explosion plot in Knox County in the 1890s.

But, at least, in those days we never had people thawing dynamite on the stove, right? Well, except for that time a couple weeks after the previous case, documented in the Nov. 15, 1894, issue of the Democratic Banner.

Over at the Wolfe Gravel Pit near Brinkhaven, things were pretty quiet the morning of Thursday, Nov. 8, 1894.

Foreman Johnston had to do some work using explosives to shatter some rock, but he had a problem. Someone had left the dynamite outside, and temperatures had plummeted the previous night. The dynamite was frozen so cold, it couldn’t be lit.

Foreman Johnston reasoned, as one does, that the dynamite might need a little thawing before it could be used. So he took some into the telegraph office which was located there because of the pit’s location adjacent to the Toledo, Walhonding Valley & Ohio Railroad (better known as the Wally Railroad).

The telegraph office had a stove, so Johnston carefully put the dynamite in a pot on the stove to help it thaw for a minute or so, and stepped outside to tend to something else.

Life being life, what Johnston was tending to took him a few minutes. Inside the office, the telegraph operator suddenly noticed a sizzling sound and looked up to see the dynamite smoldering on the stove.

He took off running like mad out the door, fleeing to the other side of the lot. When he stopped and turned around, he saw the foreman walking toward the door to check on the thawing process.

“Run for your life!” the telegraph officer shouted, but it was too late. Just before Johnston reached the door, the whole telegraph office exploded with devastating force. Johnston was badly injured, with a particularly bad wound on his hip from building debris, and bruises all over the rest of his body from being smacked by the disintegrating building.

The office was a total loss, but the telegraph operator had at least cleared enough distance that he was uninjured and was able to help Johnston.

At this point, I decided to stop looking at any more old newspapers, lest I find our forebears blowing up even more stuff. History is a lot calmer when you don’t actually look it up.