Women War Workers 1861 - 1865

During the Civil War, the Washington Arsenal was the largest Federal arsenal and the closest for shipping war materials to fighting fronts in Virginia. Thousands of caissons and limbers, wagons and ambulances, cannon balls and mortar shells were built and stored there, with most of the heavy work done by male members of the Ordnance Department and civilian contract employees. The war also brought the first large-scale employment of women outside the home, and because of their superior finger dexterity, hundreds of women worked there hand making small arms cartridges; by June 1864 they were producing 120,000 cartridges per day. On Friday, June 17, 1864, a spark flew through an open window, ignited an open bin of gunpowder, and killed twenty-one women war workers, though others were saved by the heroism of Storekeeper E.M. Stebbins and officers and soldiers of the 16th and 19th U.S. Infantry Regiments. The explosion, which came with the shock of an earthquake, cast intense sorrow over Washington, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered that the government pay all funeral and interment expenses and spare no means in expressing respect and sympathy for the dead and their surviving friends. President Abraham Lincoln and Stanton led a funeral cortege of 150 carriages that took half an hour to pass. Four victims, Johanna Connors, Bridget Dunn, Margaret Horan, and Rebeca Hull, were interred in Mt. Olivet Cemetery under Catholic auspices, while the remaining seventeen were buried at Congressional Cemetery near the Middle Gate close to the Western Wall beneath a 25-foot marble monument adorned with the figure of a young woman.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States