Oldtimer's Stories
The Great Marshburg Explosion
BY HAROLD THOMAS BECK
Just before his death several years ago, the
honorary Mayor of the Village of Marshburg, Larry Ely, relayed a story to me that dated
back to his youth.
"It was just before the war. I was seventeen or eighteen and living with my
parents down on Sugar Run. I was working in the oil fields and we used nitroglycerine to
shoot the wells. The war in Europe was really kicking up and oil was at a premium. The
Marshburg field was really producing a load of oil then and some high rollers were really
cleaning up."
Now old Larry did like his beer and his martinis. We were at the Rainbow Inn and I was
tending bar that day. Larry had "settled" his stomach with a few beers before
getting into the martinis. It was after one or two of them, he would get to the story
telling. That day he had an especially good one.
"It was a employee of American Powder Company, a man by the name of John Gloss. He
was from Irvin Mills, NY and was driving a truck loaded with 500 quarts of nitro. He was
taking it to a magazine near Clarendon over in Warren County and had a few stops along the
way. He drove the truck through downtown Smethport and up the hill and across the flats on
Route 59.
"He had to make a few deliveries along the way and had one that amounted to two
quarts in Marshburg. He took care of the first ones easy enough and cut down 219 to Custer
City and then up Route 770. It wasn't much of a road. It was an old railroad grade that
was leveled out, just wide enough for a truck or two cars. He made that delivery and
visited with a few of his buddies. They say he tasted a few swallows of moon shine, just
to steady his nerves, before going on his way."
The mention of the moon shine must have made Larry thirsty. He finished his second
martini and ordered a third. While it may seem like Larry was drinking fast, he really
wasn't. Larry didn't drink fast, he just drank a lot. Larry also talked very slow. It
might take him a minute or so to get the sentence completed. He would work it over in his
mind and actually rearrange the words. He chose every thought carefully and then doing
that, he would deliver completed product.
"I was working in the Marshburg field that day. I saw the truck as it pulled away.
It was September 19, 1941. The leaves on the trees were changing. They weren't big trees
then. The whole hill top had been cut clean. First it was the hemlock; then later, the
smaller trees by the Chemical Plants to make charcoal for the steel mills in Buffalo. The
forest was about ten years old then and just starting to come back.
"I guess old Gloss got himself started toward Warren." Larry laughed to
himself and then explained. "Gloss was only 24 or 25. He was old to a skinny kid like
me. He doesn't seem so old now that I am this age." He laughed again and took a sip
of his drink.
"Cliff Martin and Clare Streeter were on their way to an oil producers’
meeting in Oil City. They were big time oil men back then. Clare was driving a black Ford
Sedan with a straight six motor in it. It would really go and he drove it wide open out on
the road. He must have tried to pass the truck. It was down just past where Pine Acres
golf course is located now. As he did the sedan must have bumped the back end of the truck
and the truck must have hit the bumpy part on the berm of the road. It must have knocked
some nitro loose.
"Anyway, there was one hell of an explosion. Streeter's car was blown backwards
about fifty feet and the nitro truck was vaporized. There was a crater in the road fifty
feet deep and the trees were flattened down for a hundred yards in every direction. Yep.
It was one hell of a blast. It damn near blew me right off the rig."
Larry sipped the gin. He didn't care for much Vermouth. I just sort of waved the cap
over it so some vapors hung around the rim of the glass. He picked out an olive and
munched on it. He mentioned something about it being lunch.
"The blast got everybody's attention. Ed Fitzgerald was driving and the explosion
brought his car to a stop. He was scared to death. He thought a bomb dropped from an
airplane. He just couldn't go on.
"Jim Bryner and Harry McAffee heard the explosion. They came up on Fitzgerald, who
was stopped in the middle of the road. They passed him and drove to the place where the
explosion took place. They were the first to reach it. Soon, they were joined by the
workers in the field. There was nothing there. There was just a hole in the ground.
"Martin was dead. His body was really mangled. The car was off the road behind the
blast, blown backwards. Streeter was cut badly by the shrapnel of the exploding truck and
the glass from the windows of his own car. He lost an eye and was lucky he wasn't killed.
The windshield wiper was sticking in his eye socket and could have just as easily gone
into his brain. He lived a long time after that. He recovered and finally died about
twenty years ago in the seventies."
"What about the driver?" I asked.
"He died. They found a few pieces that they said was him. A piece of a hand was in
a tree about two hundreds yard away and his shoe was up the road sitting right in the
center. Outside of that, there wasn't too much left of him. The crater is still there.
They filled it in best as they could and built the road over it."
Larry ordered another martini and continued reminiscing.
"The war came along in December. I enlisted in the Navy and never went back to the
fields as a rough neck. I did go back as a welder after the war, but it wasn't the same. I
used to watch those boys and I always missed it, just a little. It was a good time then,
just before the war. It was never the same for me later."
Larry is gone now and so are his hours of story telling on snowy Marshburg afternoons
at the Rainbow Inn. With him, an era went also. When the last of those men falls, it will
be as if it never happened. He is missed. So are his stories.
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