Powder House Island
Powder House Island is an artificial island on the lower Detroit River in southeast Michigan, directly adjacent to the Canada–United States border. It was constructed in the late 1880s by the Dunbar & Sullivan Company to store explosives during their dredging of the Livingstone Channel, with the purpose of circumventing an 1880 court order forbidding the company to store explosives on nearby Fox Island.
Powder House Island was the location of dynamite storage sheds, as well as a dynamite factory and several ice houses. During this time, it was the site of a series of accidents, including fires in 1895 and 1919. of the island's dynamite exploded in 1906 after two men "had been shooting with a revolver" near it; while there were no deaths, windows were shattered away and the explosion was clearly audible from away.
After the completion of the Livingstone Channel in 1912, the island continued to be used for storing explosives, including during later projects to deepen the channel in the 1930s. By the 1980s it was completely unused, and by 2015 the island was owned by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, managed by its Wildlife Division as part of the Pointe Mouillee State Game Area, and accessible to the public for hunting.
Geography
Powder House Island is contained within Grosse Ile Township, in Wayne County, Michigan. It is near the southern end of the Detroit River, closer to Lake Erie than to Lake St. Clair, and around from the water border with Canada. It is approximately east of Fox Island. Further to its west is Grosse Ile, beyond which is Trenton. To its east, across the Livingstone Channel, is the Canadian Bois Blanc Island. The southern tip of Stony Island is around to the northeast; other islands in the vicinity include Sugar Island to the south and Elba Island to the southwest. The island, which is covered in foliage, is approximately from north to south, and from east to west, giving it an approximate area of. The United States Geological Survey gave its elevation as above sea level in 1980. In Wayne County records, the island is listed as "Dynamite Island", in ZIP code 48138; it is contained within a single parcel.History
Background and first explosion
In the late 19th century, the Dunbar & Sullivan Company won a number of government contracts to widen and deepen shipping channels in the Detroit River, including the Livingstone Channel and Lime-Kiln Crossing. This work involved large amounts of blasting, due to limestone bedrock in the area; the nearby Fox Island was a natural choice for storage of explosive compounds. On December 12, 1879, the three tons of nitroglycerin stored on Fox Island detonated unexpectedly, destroying all structures on the island and leaving a crater wide and deep. The resultant shock wave shattered the windows of nearby houses, and was clearly audible in St. Clair some to the north.Injunction and second explosion
In March 1880, litigation related to the circumstances of the explosion resulted in an injunction being issued by the Wayne County chancery court in the case of Walter Crane v. Charles F. Dunbar et al. The injunction forbade the company's operators, Charles F. Dunbar and Daniel B. Reaume, to engage in "storing nitroglycerine or any other explosive material on Fox Island".In order to continue work on the channel, it was necessary to store the explosives somewhere; Dunbar and Reaume requested that the injunction be dissolved. Shortly afterwards, however, another explosion occurred at the Lime-Kiln Crossing worksite on September 24, 1880, which shook houses in Amherstburg "to their foundations", and could be felt in the town of Essex away. Dunbar and Reaume's request was denied in November, and it became evident that a new location would need to be found or created.
Construction of new island
After the injunction was issued, Dunbar & Sullivan resorted to storing their explosives on a scow anchored several hundred yards to the east of Fox Island. While this allowed work to continue, it was not a permanent solution. The scow had limited capacity; Dunbar & Sullivan had to purchase raw materials and manufacture dynamite, Hercules powder, and other explosive materials themselves at the work site. Storing dynamite would require a much larger facility, which was only practical if situated on solid land.While Dunbar & Sullivan had been forbidden to store explosives on Fox Island, the location of the worksite meant that there were few other places to do so. The southern extension of Stony Island had not yet been constructed, and all other land within a reasonable distance of the worksite was inhabited. By 1881, houses had been built along the shore of Grosse Ile, and Hickory and Sugar Island were being used as campgrounds; on the Canadian side, Bois Blanc Island was being used for summer vacation homes. It was therefore decided that an artificial island would be constructed next to Fox Island, to which the 1880 injunction would not apply.
The risks involved in manufacturing and handling explosive devices on the putative artificial island would be largely identical to those incurred by the Fox Island facility—the explosions there had caused damage for miles around, and the new site was only a couple hundred yards away. No additional structures or mechanisms were planned to help contain or redirect the energy of an unintentional detonation; the primary difference between the two sites was that one of them had not existed when the ruling was made, and was therefore not subject to it. It is unclear why government engineering authorities approved of this reasoning, or indeed that they even did; the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals later said that "no formal action appears to have been taken by the government or any officer thereof, giving the defendant the right to erect the island all that was shown was at most a verbal permission and an acquiescence on the part of the government officers in charge of the Lime-Kiln Crossing work".
Regardless, by May 1881, construction was underway: between eight and ten carpenters, directed by John P. Jones, were employed in the construction of a scow. This scow was tasked with carrying rock from channel excavation to a site several hundred yards to the east of Fox Island, and dumping it on the river floor. Eventually, the scow was scuttled atop the rock; the resultant mound was high enough to rise above water level.
Once it was large and solid enough to permit the erection of structures, the dynamite operations of Dunbar & Sullivan were moved to the island. While it was initially referred to as "Dunbar Island", it eventually became known as "Powder House Island".
Shanties were erected to contain and shelter the large quantities of dynamite required for channel excavation. They caught fire on April 21, 1895, and the island "burned to the water's edge". In 1904, it was reported that Canadian police had found American poachers, illegally fishing for sturgeon, living in a shack on the island. By 1906, of dynamite were stored on the island; a witness was quoted as saying "you could throw a cat through the cracks" in dynamite shanties of questionable quality.
Third explosion
On June 27, 1906, the twenty short tons of dynamite in Dunbar & Sullivan's facilities exploded. Powder House Island was shaken by an explosion "so terrific in nature that the residents of the town and pleasure-seekers on adjacent islands thought it was an earthquake visitation". Two men, Henry Rogers and Theodore Perry, were injured; they had just left the island, and were from the shore, when a sudden explosion launched them from their catboat, tore the clothes from their backs, and caused severe burns and lacerations. The Detroit Free Press described an "immediate cessation of pleasure" which occurred among people in the immediate vicinity. Charles Stedman, a vacationer from Indiana on a trip with his wife and children to Bois Blanc Island, said:We were sprawled out in the shade of a tree when the shock came. It was the most effective transformation scene I ever witnessed. The river in the vicinity of the dynamite houses was instantly lashed into a seething torrent. Rocks and spray shot hundreds of feet into the air, and the report was followed immediately by a shower of white that I afterward learned was limestone. Big trees were uprooted by the shock, and the one under which we were camped rocked ominously. All was confusion on the picnic grounds. Women shrieked in dismay, and repentant men fell upon their knees and began to offer fervent invocations for divine intercession.
In the aftermath of the explosion, thousands of windows were shattered on Grosse Ile alone, plate glass was broken away in Trenton, and work on the shipping channel was delayed due to the loss of blasting equipment. The shock wave from the explosion was felt as far as Cleveland, Ohio, away on the other side of Lake Erie. The island itself was described as a "wreck", which needed to be rebuilt with many scowloads of stone and mud. The cause of the explosion was not known with certainty, as it had been a hot day, but it was suspected to be related to Rogers and Perry firing revolvers near the dynamite storage area immediately before it exploded.
The men said they had been shooting with a revolver, and it is supposed that one of the bullets touched off the fireworks. While admitting that the explosion may have been caused by the heat, experts do not think this theory at all plausible.
The explosion has been the subject of misinformation: a June 28 article in the Detroit Free Press pushed the untrue claim that the explosion had occurred on Fox Island. On July 6, the Yale Expositor, while correctly reporting that the explosion had occurred on Dynamite Island, claimed that there had been of explosives across two artificial islands, and that "a keg of one of the explosives was hurled into the central part of Grosse Ile and there exploded in a clump of woods, tearing century old oaks into splinters". A 2016 article in the Trenton Tribune would later falsely state that the explosion happened in 1907.
These baseless claims have been debunked by fact-checkers; court proceedings concerning the lawsuit related to the explosion state that it took place in June 1906, from twenty tons of dynamite, on a single island. These details were not disputed by the plaintiff, defendant, or judiciary.