Arsenal Explosion Mass Grave

Washington, DC

On June 17, 1864, disaster struck the Washington Arsenal: pyrotechnic star flares left out to dry on metal pans by superintendent Tom Brown got too much sun. They ignited. The fireworks flew into one of the Arsenal's buildings, turning it into an inferno. 21 workers, all of them women, were killed.

President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton attended the joint funeral procession, which ended at Congressional Cemetery, where 15 of the victims were buried in a mass grave. One year later the tallest monument in the cemetery, 25 feet high, was dedicated over the spot. Built of blue rock, granite, and Italian marble, the monument is topped with a Lot Flannery statue called Grief (Flannery later sculpted DC's oldest statue of Abraham Lincoln). On its southern face the monument bears a bas-relief of the explosion, with smoke billowing out of the doomed building.

[Grave report by Kurt Deion]