DIRTY JOBS: Careers of Danger and Daring (Illustrated Edition) - How did they do it 100 years ago

II.
How They Blew Off the Top of a Steeple with Dynamite

Known over all Connecticut was the Congregational Church in Hartford, that stood for years on Pearl Street, and was famous alike for the burning words spoken beneath its roof, and the tall, straight spire that reached above it; two hundred and thirty-eight feet measured the drop from cross to pavement. But churches pass like other things, and near the century-end came the decision by landowners and lease interpreters that this graceful length of brownstone and the pile beneath it must move off the premises, which meant, of course, that the steeple must come down, the time appointed for this demolition being August, 1899.

Now, the taking down of a steeple two hundred and thirty-eight feet high, that rises on a closely built city street, is not so simple a proceeding as might at first appear. If you suggest pulling the steeple over, all the neighbors cry out. They wish to know where it is going to strike. Are you sure it won't smash down on their housetops? Can you make a steeple fall this way or that way, as woodmen make trees fall? How do you know you can? Besides, how are you going to hitch fast the rope that will pull it over? And who will climb with such a rope to the steeple-top? It must be said that there is usually some young man at hand, some dare-devil character of the vicinity, who is ready to try the thing and is positive he can succeed at it. But, luckily, he seldom gets a chance to try.

"It's queer," said Merrill, telling me the story, "how people ever built a steeple like this one without a window in it, or an air-passage, or anything for ventilation. Between the bell-deck and the cross there wasn't a single opening from the inside out, so I had to break my way through up near the top. What a place for a man to work, squeezed in the point of a stifling funnel, with no swing for his hammer, and no air to breathe, and the scorch of an August sun! After fifteen minutes of it, my wrists and temples would be pounding so I'd have to come down and rest.

"Of course the purpose of this hole that I knocked through the steeple-top was to make fast ropes and pulleys, so my partner and I could hoist ourselves along the outside, and not have to climb up the inside cross-beams, which, I can tell you, is a lively bit of athletics. Well, we got our ropes fixed all right, about twenty-five feet below the top, and the 'bosun's saddle' swung below for us to travel up and down in, and then we made fast another set of ropes and pulleys about fifteen feet higher up; this was for hoisting timber and stuff that we needed."

"How did you get up that fifteen feet?" I inquired.

"Worked up on the stirrups—that is, two nooses around the steeple, each ending in a loop, one for the right foot, one for the left. You stand in the right stirrup and work the left loop up, then you stand in the left stirrup and work the right loop up. Sometimes in hard places you have to throw your nooses around the shaft as a cowboy casts a rope. Come down some day and watch us work; you'll see the whole thing."

To this invitation I gave glad acceptance; I certainly wished to see this stirrup-climbing process.

"The next thing," continued Merrill, "was to make another hole in the steeple through a keystone a little below our first hole. In this hole we set a block of Norway pine resting on an iron jack. The block was about a foot square and twenty-two inches high, a big tough piece, you see, and by screwing up the jack we could make that part as solid as the keystone was. We made this hole on the east side of the steeple, which was the side we wanted her to fall on, the only side she could fall on without injuring something; and we had it figured out so close that we dug a trench on that side straight out from the steeple's base, ten feet wide and four feet deep, and told people we intended to have the whole top of that steeple, say a length of thirty-five feet and a weight of thirty-five tons, come off at one time and land right square in that trench and nowhere else. That's what we intended to do.

"Now began the hoisting of materials; first a lot of half-inch wire cable, enough for four turns around the steeple, then eight sixteen-foot timbers, two inches thick and a foot wide, then a lot of maple wedges. We bandaged the steeple with the cable and drew it tight with tackle. Then we lowered the timbers lengthwise inside the cable, which we could do because the steeple was an octagon with ornamented corners, and these left spaces where the wire rope was stretched around. Then we wedged fast the eight timbers so that they formed a sixteen-foot half-collar on the west side of the steeple just opposite our hole where the jack was. In other words, we had the steeple shored in so that when we let her go no loose stones could fall on the west side; everything must fall to the east.

"Last of all, we widened our hole on the east side, stripping away stones until that whole side lay open in a half-circular mouth about four feet high. And in this mouth were two teeth, one might say, that held the stone jaws apart, the iron jack biting into the block of Norway pine. On those two now came the steeple's weight, or, anyhow, one half of it. To knock out one of these teeth would be to leave the east side of the steeple unsupported, with the result that it must topple over in that direction and fall to the ground. Anyway, that was our reasoning, and it seemed sound enough; the only question was how we were going to knock out that block of Norway pine.

"Well the day of the test came, and I guess five thousand people were there to see what would happen. Everybody was discussing it, and farmers had driven in for miles just as they do for a hanging. You understand I was under the orders of the contractor, and he had his own plan about getting the block out. He proposed to hitch a rope to it, drop this rope to a donkey-engine in the yard, and set the engine winding up the rope. He said the block would have to come out then and the steeple fall. I agreed that the block might come out, but was afraid it would tip up through the strain coming at an angle, and throw the steeple over to the west, just the way we didn't want it to go. And if that steeple ever fell to the west, there was no telling how many people it would kill in the crowd, without counting damage to houses.

"However, the contractor was boss, and he stuck to it his way was right, so we hitched the engine to the block and set her going. She puffed and tugged a little, and then snapped the rope. We got another rope, and she broke that too. Then we got a stronger rope, and the engine just kicked herself around the yard and had lots of fun, but the block never budged. All that morning we tried one scheme after another to make that engine pull the block out, but we might as well have hitched a rope to the church; the steeple's weight was too much for us. And all the time the crowd was getting bigger and bigger, until the police could hardly manage it.

"Finally the contractor, being very mad and quite anxious, said he'd be hanged if he could get the block out, and for me to try my scheme, and do it quick, for some men were going about saying the thing was dangerous and ought to be stopped. He didn't have to speak twice before I was on my way up that steeple carrying an inch auger, a fifty-foot fuse, and a stick of dynamite—I'd had them ready for hours. It's queer how people get wind of a thing; the crowd seemed to know in a minute that I was going to use dynamite, and before I was twenty feet up the ladder a police officer was after me, ordering me down. I went right ahead, pretending not to hear, and when I got to the bell-deck he was puffing along ten yards below me. I swung into my 'bosun's saddle' and began pulling myself up outside the steeple, and I guess the whole five thousand people around the church bent back their heads to watch me.

"As soon as I began to rise in the saddle I knew I was all right, for I coiled up the hauling-line on my arm so the officer couldn't follow me. All he could do was stand on the bell-deck and gape after me like the rest and growl.

"When I reached the block I bored a six-inch hole into her at a downward slant, and in this I put some crumbs of dynamite,—not much, only about half a teaspoonful,—and then I stuck in the fuse and tamped her solid with sand. Then I lit the other end, dropped it down inside the steeple, and slid down the rope as fast as I could, yelling to the officer that I'd touched her off. You ought to have seen him get out of that steeple! He never waited to arrest me or anything; he had pressing business on the ground!

"By the time I got down you could see a little trail of bluish smoke drifting away from the hole, and there was a hush over the crowd, except for the police trying to make them stand back behind the ropes. I don't know as I ever saw a bigger crowd; the street was jammed for blocks either way. Well, sir, that was a queer acting fuse. It smoked and smoked for about ten minutes, and then the smoke stopped. The people began to laugh—they said it had gone out; and the contractor was nearly crazy: he was sure I had made another failure. I didn't know what to think; I just waited. We waited ten minutes, twelve minutes; it seemed like an hour, but nobody dared go up to see what the matter was. Then suddenly the explosion came—no louder than a pistol-crack, for dynamite isn't noisy, but it stirred me more than a cannon.

"'Start your engine!' I shouted, and the little dummy had just time to wind up half a turn of the hitch-line when the old steeple-top swayed and broke clean in two, right where the block was, and the whole upper length fell like...