THE MONUMENT AT CHURCH HILL

THE MONUMENT AT CHURCH HILL

BY RORY MORGAN

The Lehigh Valley’s heavy industries - steel, slate, railroads - had a long history of stealing life and limb from their workers. Cement manufacturing certainly added its share of names to the casualty lists. 

 

A monument at the back of Church Hill Cemetery, near Martin’s Creek, attests to this. There, a plaque is mounted on a monument, a plaque with a list of names starting with Benjamin (Bennie) Ascani and rolling on through 30 others, the last being Arthur Zappasodi. On the morning of March 26, 1942, these men reported to work at the Lehigh Portland Cement Company quarry, located at Sandt’s Eddy, in Lower Mount Bethel Township, a few miles north of Easton. They had no way of knowing that they had entered the last hours of their lives, or that soon there would be 18 new widows and over 60 newly-fatherless children in the area. A Polish-born father and son, Adam and Leon Miechur - would soon die together, as would the Italian-born Ascani brothers - Benny and Joseph.

 

But what was behind this tragedy? 

Making cement begins at a quarry that provides “cement rock” to a cement manufacturing facility. (Cement rock is essentially limestone with clay interspersed through it.) Blast holes are drilled into the ground, behind the working face of the quarry. They are typically six or so inches in diameter; their depth can vary as needed. The holes are filled with explosive, which is then fired via the use of electric blasting caps. The resulting explosion rips off the face of the quarry, sending a considerable amount of rubble to the ground, which is gathered and taken to the manufacturing plant to be processed.

The processing starts by breaking the rubble into smaller chunks and adding any additional necessary material, such as gypsum. The cement is inserted into kilns, which are heated to a temperature of over 2,600 degrees (Farenheit). This converts the cement into “clinker” - lumps of material, called nodules, which are about the size of marbles or softballs. Because of the heat, they are chemically different from the original cement rock. The clinker is ground to a very fine powder, which is usually bagged in sacks of 94 pounds or placed into barrels, each holding 376 pounds. The product has been transformed from “natural cement” into “portland cement” - so named because of its resemblance to rock from the Isle of Portland, off of the southwestern coast of England.

Cement manufacturing is a risky business. Besides blasting, danger comes from the extreme heat, from the powerful machinery that reduces the cement rubble from the quarry to smaller chunks and from the machinery which grinds the clinker to powder. On that fateful March day, the risk of cement making came calling at Sandt’s Eddy. The quarry plans for the day included a blast; preparations had begun. More than 30 blast holes had been drilled in a line located approximately 15 feet behind the top edge of the face. The holes were about 10-15 feet apart and approximately 100 feet deep. (Ingersoll Rand manufactured rock drills; there’s certainly a chance that IR’s product was used to prepare for the blast.) The dynamite was piled alongside each hole and the workers - referred to as the “charging party” - began to insert the explosive into the holes. 

The explosive was dynamite - about 20 tons (roughly 4,000 sticks) had been delivered to the quarry that morning by the Hercules Powder Company, coming from its operation in Belvidere, NJ. Three representatives of Hercules were on the scene: George Hadesty, Jr., from Allentown, the company’s regional manager; Ernest Ray Garnett, a blasting expert; and William Lanahan, the salesman who handled the Sandt’s Eddy account. By about 9:15, approximately 33 blast holes had been charged. The workers took a break. Some of them used the opportunity to eat some lunch or a snack. 

There was no warning whatsoever before an enormous explosion occurred. Windows were reportedly broken in Easton and Allentown, including one at the Easton Upholstery Company on Northampton Street. In Bethlehem, there was speculation that Bethlehem Steel had blown up. Pearl Harbor had happened less than three months before; was this another surprise attack? Reports came in that the explosion had been heard and felt in Philadelphia and Camden. 

A number of students and teachers at a near-by elementary school, about a mile away on Mud Run Road, were injured (none seriously) by flying glass. The operator of the Sandt’s Eddy Hotel was knocked out of bed. A farmer who was working ¾ of a mile away was knocked off of his tractor. Amazingly, a crew of 16 workers at the quarry bottom were showered with stones, but escaped death or significant injury.

Word quickly began to spread to the nearby communities. Panicked people in Easton and other towns jammed the phone lines with calls to hospitals, police and fire stations and the Northampton County Courthouse. Calls to the Easton Express office numbered 4,800 in the two hours following the event.The roads to the quarry were soon choked with cars, slowing down the arrival of emergency crews. 

Nevertheless, doctors, nurses, first aid squads and firemen did start to arrive, but discovered that there was little for them to do. There were no injured victims; just 31 dead ones. Body parts littered the area for 200 to 300 yards, on the ground and, reportedly, in the trees. The death certificates for most of the victims listed the official cause of death as simply “body blown to pieces.” A few suffered “3rd degree burns over entire body”.  As remains were collected, they were placed at the bottom of the quarry, and covered with cement sacks. Body parts were placed in the cement sacks. One man’s arm was identified only by his ring. The Northampton County Coroner decided that a coroner’s inquest was unnecessary; there were no survivors who could provide any additional information.

Most of the victims were from the Martin’s Creek area; most of the funerals were held at St. Rocco’s in Martin’s Creek. Because the church was small, multiple masses, one after the other,  were necessary. There was a casket for each victim, sealed and labeled with his name. Two local undertakers took responsibility for most of the victims: the Hutchinson Funeral Home in Martins Creek and the Adams Funeral Home in Easton.

 

Of course, inquiries into the cause of the explosion soon followed. Who was to blame? The question of sabotage was raised - an airplane had been seen overhead before the explosion. Had it dropped a delayed-action bomb? Had a hidden sniper fired an explosive bullet into a pile of dynamite? However, sabotage was soon dismissed by the FBI, which had sent two agents from Philadelphia to help with the investigation.

Hercules, not surprisingly, issued a “not our fault” statement. It put forward a theory that involved 1,000 (or perhaps 1,500) old blasting caps that it had made for Lehigh years before. It threw blame at Lehigh by stating that it had been warned that the caps would be unstable because of their age; that they should not be used, but, in fact, should be destroyed. It's a possibility that these caps were put down into the blast holes, to be destroyed in the planned explosion. Given their instability, a rock falling into a blast hole and hitting a cap could have triggered the accidental explosion.

The eventual report of the state’s Labor and Industry Secretary adopted the unstable caps theory and strongly criticized the three on-site Hercules representatives - although the fact that they were among the dead victims prevented them from defending their actions. In the end, the cause would remain a mystery. (Sandt’s Eddy wasn’t the first time that Hercules dealt with a mysterious, deadly explosion. In 1940, 52 were killed by an explosion at the company’s plant in Roxbury, NJ.)

James Gish was the superintendent of the Sandt’s Eddy plant; he estimated that the plant would be down for about three months, primarily due to the inability of the quarry to supply the necessary raw materials. The plant itself did not suffer major damage.

The victims’ families received a $200 death benefit from the Pennsylvania fund for injured workers, as well as modest future income payments based on family size and ages.  About a year after the explosion, five of the widows sued Hercules Powder in Federal court for $150,000 each, asserting that Hercules was in charge of the blast and therefore was responsible. (The outcome of the suits is not known as of this writing.) 

Hercules sold out to Ashland Inc. in 2008. While it appears that some Ashland subsidiaries still carry the Hercules name, none of them have any operations in the United States.

The quarry and cement plant closed many years ago, in the early 1960s. The site is now used by Ardent Mills for manufacturing flour and by Easton Block and Supply, for manufacturing construction and building materials.

Special thanks for assistance with this article go out to Marx Room patron William Grant and to Ed Pany, of the Atlas Cement Company Memorial Museum in Northampton.