At noon on November 30, 1944, a World War II supply train hauling 165 five-hundred-pound bombs headed for the Pacific Theater derailed in Tolar. The train caught fire and the bombs exploded. The blast leveled nearly every building in town, could be heard 60 miles away, vaporized 500 feet of track, and sent a 1,500-pound axle crashing through a store and rolling out the back. One person, Jess Brown, was killed when a piece of iron shrapnel struck his head.