Explosives and Ramsay MT

House at 35 Palmer, Ramsay, MT. DuPont built Ramsay as a company town in 1916-1917 to house workers at its explosives factory, which was located north of the Butte-Anaconda highway (now I-90). The town’s twenty-eight houses, which line two north-south streets (Laird and Palmer) fell into three standardized styles, each style named for one of DuPont’s earlier company towns. Nineteen of the houses, including 35 Palmer Street and all the other houses along Palmer, were of the DuPont style. The other two styles were called Hopewell (six examples) and Louviers (three surviving examples). The factory and the magazines north of the highway have all been destroyed, the only surviving structure of the complex being the steel water tower. Source: Photo by Fred Quivik, July 2024.

Two of the most important technologies that industrialization brought to the mining industry, at about the time Butte mining entered the scene, were mechanized drilling and high explosives.

Prior to those innovations, miners made holes in the rock for explosives by using hand drills and sledgehammers, and they used black powder for the explosive charge to break the rock. Both new technologies greatly increased the productivity of labor in the mines, but both technologies also had potentially negative consequences for miners’ health and safety. Mechanized drilling increased the dustiness in mines with harmful consequences for miners’ lungs (namely silicosis). Dynamite was safer to use than black powder, but it could still be deadly, with either premature explosions or sticks of dynamite that didn’t go off when they were supposed to. Moreover, some dynamite didn’t explode completely, leaving deadly gas in the mine workings.

The federal government began regulating the transportation of explosives in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the 1890s, Butte also had an ordinance requiring where explosives for mining could be stored. But the regulations were often ignored, as demonstrated by the Great Butte Warehouse Explosion of 1895, which killed 58. Two warehouse companies were found criminally negligent for storing explosives in violation of the law. A federal law passed in 1908 gave regulatory authority for packing, handling, and transporting explosives to the Interstate Commerce Commission. The mines in Butte were subject to these and subsequent regulations. Explosives had to be stored in structures that were far from buildings, highways, etc.

During the First World War, there was a high demand for explosives both for the war effort and for increased production from the mines. To respond to that demand in Butte, the DuPont Company built a small plant west of Butte to make explosives. DuPont was founded in the late 1700s to make black powder, and in the early 1900s was the leading manufacturer of dynamite in the U.S. To house workers for the plant, DuPont built the company town of Ramsay. DuPont’s Ramsay plant had a capacity to make 700,000 pounds of dynamite per month.

In large mines, such as in Butte, responsibility for explosives was given to a very small group of experienced men. The shift boss at each mine designated a powder magazine man for each operating level in the mine. That man issued powder and fuses to miners on his level during the shift, and he also submitted an order of explosive supplies to the timekeeper each week. The orders for all the mines were shipped by rail from Ramsay to Butte once a week, and trucks hauled the explosives from the railcar to each mine, where they were placed in special wood-lined cars and moved to underground magazines on each level. Each mine had its own fuse-cutting house on the surface, where each fuse was cut and capped. Fuses with blasting caps were then moved to fuse magazines on each level. Fuse magazines were located near but at a safe distance from powder magazines.

After the war, lack of demand depressed the copper market, production from Butte mines declined, and DuPont decided to close its plant in 1921. The company eventually put the houses in Ramsay on the market for individuals to purchase. The patterns of the company houses are still visible along the streets of Ramsay, and the Ramsay Historic District is listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its historical significance associated with the First World War, with Butte’s growth as a significant mining center, and as a DuPont company town.

After DuPont ceased making explosives at Ramsay, it retained a storage magazine north of town. The storage structures were arranged in a semi-circle. Each structure had earth banked against three of its four walls. The fourth, unbanked wall faced away from the center of the semi-circle so, if the contents exploded, the blast would be directed away from the other structures. The magazine structures survived into the 1980s.