Fountain, Colorado

Colorado

A murder cover-up on a freight train sent eighteen tons of explosives rolling toward Fountain in 1888.

disasterhistorical

Just after three in the morning on May the fourteenth, 1888, a freight train loaded with eighteen tons of explosives met a passenger train head on in the middle of Fountain. The conductor of the passenger train got a frantic warning out, and thirty riders jumped clear of the locomotive before the two met. The explosion was heard for miles. It flattened a church and a grocery store, and it left a crater in the ground forty feet across and fifteen feet deep. Twenty-eight people were hurt. Three were killed. Charles Smith sold lumber in town and had come from Keokuk, Iowa. Henry Hutchins was a Fountain merchant. Sarah Widrig made hats. The town still calls it The Blast, and every July there is a street dance at City Hall Plaza to mark it.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The crash destroyed a nearby church, a grocery store and created a large crater in the ground forty feet in diameter and fifteen feet deep.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • 10th Field Hospital 6.6 mi A unit based here kept ninety-eight out of every hundred wounded soldiers alive, the highest survival rate in the history of American warfare.
  • Pikes Peak International Raceway 6.7 mi A rival racing company bought this speedway for eleven million dollars, shut it down, hauled the scoreboard off to Texas, and then sold it with a clause forbidding professional racing forever.
  • Peterson Space Force Base 9.3 mi The base is named for a lieutenant who died on takeoff there, four months before the field got his name.
  • Cheyenne Mountain Complex 9.7 mi A single bad computer chip inside Cheyenne Mountain once issued false warnings that a missile attack had begun.
  • Cheyenne Creek 11.6 mi Two men dammed this creek in the 1880s to make a lake that would help sell a hotel and casino, and then had to sue the city for stealing the water.
  • South Cheyenne Cañon 12.1 mi A poet asked to be buried at the top of the trail above Seven Falls, and for a while she was.