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The dynamite blast that rattled Helenwood in 1935
On April 16, 1935, the peaceful town of Helenwood was rattled by a dynamite blast that destroyed several buildings, damaged others, but miraculously killed no one. It is an event that is still remembered today, more than 90 years later.
To set the scene: Helenwood sprang up as a railroad town, thanks in large part to the coal mines along Sulpher Creek to the east. Helenwood dates back as far as the late 1850s. On July 27, 1859, the town of Homestead was surveyed and laid out in 50-ft. by 200-ft. lots, according to Kathleen West Robbins. Ninety of those spots were sold. Among the plots were designated locations for a school, a church, and a town square.
For one reason or another, the town of Homestead never took off as it was envisioned. But things changed when the railroad was built in the late 1870s. Helenwood became an important depot on the Cincinnati & Southern Railroad.
It started merely as a siding when the railroad was built. But then coal was discovered along Sulpher Creek, and a new town was born. A rail spur was built across from about where Cumberland Wood Products is located today, traveling along the old Paint Rock Road (which is today Sulpher Creek Road) and up Sulpher Creek itself to the mines.
The Helenwood post office opened in 1880, and the town’s first store — owned by Ike Shoemaker — opened that same year. The town was the site of Scott County’s first newspaper, The Scott County Call, and was connected to the county seat at Huntsville by a narrow pike that was Scott County’s best road at that time. We know it today as Monticello Pike. A Presbyterian church was established in 1883, and the Baptist church that remains in the center of town soon followed.
As buildings sprang up around the railroad depot, several saloons opened, and Helenwood gained a reputation as a wild and woolly barroom town. A number of murders took place there — more than in any other location in Scott County, though several of them were considered justified killings for one reason or another and were never prosected.
In time, the coal played out and things quietened down around Helenwood. The mines closed for a period of time, and the old Campbell Coal Company buildings were used to start the Treat School for Boys in 1910. However, the mines were reopened by Church Pemberton and James Baker, who founded the Ridgeway Sprinkle Co. But in the 1920s, the mines closed for good.
The old dynamite, though, continued to be stored in an abandoned warehouse building in town. The commissary had closed, with the top story of the building being used as a Masonic hall for Helenwood Lodge 570 F & AM.
“Most of the people living in this small town knew that (the warehouse) was being used for storing ‘bootleg’ powder and dynamite,” Kathleen West Robbins wrote for the FNB Chronicle in 1989. “Some of the townspeople had brought charges against the man, George T. Webb, who had been selling this powder and dynamite and he had been ordered to move it out of town on several occasions. But the ones who lived nearby had seen and heard him unloading more of it into the building at night sometime in the early part of the Spring of 1935. They knew it now contained more of this material. They were aware that it was a dangerous situation but they had not gotten around to doing anything about it.”
Robbins, the daughter of Lawrence and Florence West, lived in a home about 500 feet from the warehouse. On the morning of April 16, 1935, Lawrence West left for the rock quarry in Glenmary, where he worked, and Kathleen and her brother, Kenneth, left for school. Florence West was home alone when the explosion occurred.
“She heard several shorts fired from a gun, some loud hollering, etc.,” Robbins wrote. “When she went to the window to see what was happening she saw the smoke.”
A fire had broken out in the warehouse. Reason Cecil, who owned a store nearby, had fired the gun to warn the townspeople. He was yelling for everyone to get as far out of town as possible.
It was later determined that a child who lived next to the warehouse had climbed onto a cabinet in his home — the Burdette Keeton residence — and pulled it over. It fell onto a wood-burning stove, knocking the pipe down and setting fire to the kitchen.
Burdette Keeton was a widow who lived with her five children. She had left to go to Oneida for a job, leaving the five children at home alone. According to an article written at the time by Anna O’Connor, wife of the railroad agent, James O’Connor, one of the children — Angelee Keeton — ran to her home to let her know the fire was spreading to the nearby mine supply store operated by Webb. It was O’Connor who alerted Reason Cecil, who in turn alerted the rest of the townspeople. Together, they likely saved many lives that day.
“I yelled to him to get his gun and shoot it, to attract people’s attention,” O’Connor told the Knoxville newspaper. “And took out across the road, shouting to everyone to run for their lives.”
O’Connor’s last stop was her own home, where she rounded up her five children and sent them out of town.
“All that running nearly finished me,” she said. “I don’t know how I did it. I have not been well since January, when I had the flu and pneumonia right after my baby was born. But somehow I kept going, and I’m sure glad I could. These people would have been killed if they hadn’t got out of town before that explosion, and I knew it.”
Cecil herded his family, including nine children, into a storm cellar to escape the blast.
“The debris could be seen in the air for miles around — and such a loud noise and concussion!” Robbins wrote. “After everything had settled down and an inventory taken, it was found that no one was killed, a few were injured but lots of damage was done to surrounding buildings.”
Most buildings within a half-mile radius were damaged or destroyed. Among the buildings damaged beyond repair was the commissary and the Masonic hall above it.
“I don’t know what the people are going to do,” O’Connor wrote. “I have my little child in the car, outside the depot, now. And we may spend the night in it. The town is wrecked.”
The American Red Cross sent a team of volunteers to Helenwood and set up a command post for residents who had lost everything they owned in the blast. For the next few weeks, the townspeople cleaned up the mess and repaired the buildings that weren’t too badly damaged. The West home was able to be repaired, and Lawrence and his family continued living in Helenwood. However, Kathleen wrote that one of the walls in her bedroom had been knocked down onto her bed. “Had it happened in the night and not been discovered in time, I probably wouldn’t have been here to write this story,” she said.
The blast made headlines throughout the South. The Chattanooga Daily Times wrote that the explosion “all but destroyed the mountain town of Helenwood.”
One man, J.Y. Phillips, led his family out of town and then realized he had forgotten his cow. He rushed back to save the cow, but the blast occurred, and both Phillips and the cow were “thrown violently to the street,” according to the Chattanooga newspaper. Phillips suffered broken ribs. As the cow fled the scene, “just in the nick of time, Phillips grabbed onto her tail and both ‘took to the woods',” the newspaper wrote.
The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that 250 kegs of blasting powder and 20 cases of dynamite were stored in the building at the time of the blast. The newspaper quoted Ed M. Gillenwaters, as saying former state fire prevention commissioner, as saying that the explosives were illegally stored.
For many years, the dynamite blast was referred to as “The Webb Explosion,” after the man who purportedly stored the explosives in the old warehouse. Today, though, it is generally known as “The Helenwood Explosion.”
On the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area’s website, the National Park Service says that it was this dynamite blast that gave Helenwood its name, for “Hell in the Woods.” However, the town was called Helenwood long before the dynamite blast. No one is sure where the name came from — it is said by some that a “Captain Wood” had a daughter named Helen, while Robbins theorized in a separate article for the FNB Chronicle that it came from the saloon days (“Hell in the Woods”). Either way, newspaper records show that the town was called Helenwood as far back as Dec. 25, 1881, when the Chattanooga Daily Times reported on the opening salvo of the Cecil-West-Smith Feud that occurred there.
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Our Newsletters:
• Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
• Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
• Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
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