Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant

Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant during WW II (Part 1)

  

Three Who Remember

          I remember the Triumph Defense Plant. People who worked there had yellow faces and hands from the powder. They had that big explosion, and I don’t know if they ever found out how many people were killed that day. The basement of the Catholic Church, which at that time was right on the street, served as the morgue. They had the bodies lying down there, trying to put them together to see who was who. A lot of the survivors went home and never even went back for their paychecks.

I was working at Bainbridge when the building blew up. I was checking trucks coming from near the Arundel Quarry to Bainbridge, and I was sitting in a ‘37 convertible when the plant blew up. The car was parked near a pier that ran out a little bit into the water, and I was sitting there, halfway dozing between trucks, and I can still feel the explosion shaking that pier; that jar came right down the river. It happened because somebody was careless. The workers were so careless that somebody said they had powder on the floor an inch deep. I don’t know how many buildings blew up. I knew guys who worked there, and they told me that they were moving cases of loaded shells and, instead of using the slow-moving conveyor, they were just tossing the cases to each other.   Bill Baker—Elkton

I was in Elkton the day that Triumph Explosives blew up. It was awful; one woman died, Mrs. Poore from Hack's Point. I was working in a different building when it happened. We made signals for the Korean War. The signals were part of a warning system for our airplane pilots. It was dangerous work, but I never got hurt.

Edna Benson Gorman, Chesapeake City

       I remember the bus that used to cross on the ferry. It was called the Red Star, and it would stop across from the old bank to pick up people who wanted to go to Elkton. It stopped right at Bramble's store and would let people off on Main Street in Elkton. My mother used to tell stories about working at Triumph Explosives during the war. They were working with live grenades and shells. And my grandmother was a nurse at Elkton's Union Hospital when the Triumph plant blew up. A lot of people were killed and they brought a lot of the badly injured into the hospital; it was gruesome.  Steve Warwick—Chesapeake City