Mount Union borough

Aetna Explosion 1916

Did you know? The building that killed six men at Mount Union had been catching fire all summer, and the paper reported it as routine local news.

August 5, 1916, in the Mount Union column of the Harrisburg Telegraph: "A number of fires occurred during the week in the cotton dry house at the Aetna powder plant."

August 19: "A fire took place in the cotton dry house at the powder plant this week, destroying some powder."

September 2: "Several fires occurred during the week in the cotton dry house at the powder plant."

September 20, page one: "SIX MEN KILLED BY EXPLOSION AT MOUNT UNION. Cotton Dry House at Plant of Aetna Explosives Company Completely Destroyed."

It happened at six in the morning. The men were changing shifts, and the paper says that is the only reason it was not far worse, because the night workers were already walking away from the building. The dry house stood about four hundred yards off from everything else, along the river bank. The injured were taken to the Huntingdon Hospital.

Six men. In a building the whole town knew kept catching fire.

What the fact check changed. CONFIRMED IN A PRIMARY SOURCE, SAME DAY, PAGE ONE, and then made much stronger. The Harrisburg Telegraph of September 20, 1916, page 1, city edition, carries the story datelined "Mount Union, Pa., Sept. 20" and reports the explosion as having happened "at 6 o'clock this morning." That kills the newspaper-date-versus-event-date trap outright: the paper and the event are the same day, and the paper says so. Every core claim in the original holds: September 20, 1916, six men killed, cotton dry house, completely destroyed, Aetna Explosives Company, Mount Union. Even the word "terrific" in the original is the newspaper's own word. TWO CLAIMS CUT. 1. "over 1,000 workers at peak production." NO SOURCE FOUND. Big round employment numbers are exactly the sort of figure that gets repeated into existence. Cut, not hedged. 2. The papers call it a powder plant and an explosives plant, and the Evening Public Ledger of October 25, 1916 has Aetna and du Pont planning to convert auxiliary factories to dyestuffs once "the demand for explosives and munitions becomes normal," which confirms munitions but not smokeless powder specifically. 3. "killing six workers in an instant" loses "in an instant." Embellishment on top of a death toll. 4. "the cost of that industrial boom was measured in lives lost to catastrophic accidents" was a plural claim with a single incident under it. IT IS NOW TRUE AND SOURCED, and this is the find of the tick. The Harrisburg Telegraph's weekly Mount Union column reported fires in that exact building on August 5, August 19 and September 2, 1916, in the seven weeks before it blew up. Three separate notices, each treated as ordinary town news. The post no longer has to assert a pattern. It can just print the paper. NOT USED: the Evening Public Ledger of January 8, 1916 reports an earlier Aetna fire "supposed to have been caused by spontaneous combustion due to overheating the building" with a loss figure the OCR renders as "J75.C0O." The figure is almost certainly $75,000 but the OCR is not clean enough to print a dollar amount from, so it is left out. The three krishocker.com and spicerweb.org URLs originally attached to this post are now unnecessary. The post stands on the newspaper.

Sources

Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked

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