About Connections: Love it or hate it, history is a map. Those who hate history think it irrelevant; many who love history think it escapism. In truth, history is the clearest road map to how we got here: America in the 21st century.
On February 8, 1875, at 4 p.m., an engine exited the Hoosac Tunnel in a cloud of steam and a swirl of bunting. Its 125 passengers cheered completion of what was the second longest tunnel in the world at that time. The trip through the “hole in the wall” from Florida to North Adams took 34 minutes. Behind the cheering and the colorful bunting lay 24 years of labor at a cost of $15,000,000 (approximately $361,195,000 today) and 195 deaths.
The 4.75-mile-long tunnel through Hoosac Mountain cost six years, more than $3,000,000, and 48 lives per mile. They would work until the money ran out or until the number of deaths spooked the other workers and they left. Then they would raise more money, hire more men, and begin work again.
In 1868, 14 years after work began, the scoffing could be heard from Boston to Berkshire. In Boston, Francis Bird, lawyer and politician, wrote “The Last Agony of the Great Bore” opposing the work. Oliver Wendell Holmes, also opposed, said the men involved — Berkshire politicians — had “tunnel on the brain.” He thought the millennium and the completion of the tunnel would happen at the same time. Scribner’s Magazine, however, concluded “the commercial intercourse of New England with the west has been greatly obstructed by the mountain barrier.” The magazine commended the determined Berkshireites for “not sitting behind their wall sucking their thumb.”
The work went on. The deaths mounted. The solution was evasive. On the one hand, they needed nitroglycerin to break through the wall. On the other hand, Arthur Nobel adapted nitroglycerin for excavation, but it was hair-trigger. It was unstable, deadly. With an unplanned explosion, there was a muffled sound underground, a flash of flame followed by a shower of rock, cloth, human flesh, and sometimes, human body parts.
Around the hole in the wall, camps sprung up. Wives followed their husbands to the work site and brought their children. They were Italian, Irish, French-Canadian. When the men came up, they were black with soot. When they did not come up, all could hear the explosions as fathers and husbands were lost. The women and children waited to learn whose father, whose husband was not coming up from the 1028-foot central shaft. In 1867, it was 13 in one day. Still the work went on.
Then it all changed. Did some scientist step in and ameliorate the danger? Did Nobel take another look? Nope. It was a drunk lab assistant bent on suicide who discovered the saving grace.
Helton Swazey was OK when sober, even affable. However, his nickname was Hel, and that described him when drunk. He assisted professor George Mowbray, who was working to mitigate the dangers of nitroglycerin with minimal success. He asked Swazey to transport some to the Florida mouth of the tunnel. Mowbray assured Swazey it would be okay, as they would “wrap it in flannel and blankets.”
However, Swazey had a date and wished to pick up his girlfriend on the way. Mowbray warned Swazey not to tell her what he was carrying as “she mightn’t like it.”
The journey began on a sub-zero New England night. Swazey picked up his girl in his open buggy, and soon she complained of the cold. Swazey obligingly took the blanket and hot water bottle tucked around the nitroglycerin and tucked it around the girl. Still cold, she suggested a stop at town hall where a party was in full swing.
Swazey was sipping whiskey to keep warm. Sadly, when he had sipped enough and swigged some more, he became obnoxious. The girl found a way home with others at the party and left him there. Drunk and alone, he finally remembered the nitro in the back of the buggy. He went out, not to deliver it, but to use it to blow up himself and town hall. He carried it from buggy to hall, he stacked it, kicked it, and threw it around. Nothing happened. He fell asleep in a drunken stupor amid the nitro. When Mowbray discovered him, he also discovered that if you freeze nitro, it is rendered inert.
With the new improvement, work on the “hole in the wall” speeded up. On Thanksgiving 1873, the last piece of rock was blasted aside. Fifteen months later, the steam engine with its excited passengers chugged through the Hoosac tunnel.
