The heritage of easy, unhurried living runs deep in Chestertown, Md. (pop. 3,200). Chestertown's citizens take pride in the stately colonial homes on Water Street overlooking the glassy waters of the Chester River, and in tiny (enrollment: 391) Washington College, which has awarded honorary degrees to Presidents from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower.
In recent memory, the biggest change for Chestertown came in 1941, when Ford Dealer Philip G. Wilmer started the Kent Manufacturing Co., to make the gadgetry of war—flares, fuses for detonators and military fireworks. "The Defense Plant," as folks called it, brought the town prosperity, but they worried a little about its site, three blocks from the campus, four from the business district. Already there had been two or three small explosions that did not hurt anyone.
Terror's Strength. Last week 18-year-old Fannie Robbins and four other women were working at a drying tunnel in the Defense Plant's "B" Building Annex. Part of an order of 12 million M-80 firecrackers, used by the Army to condition troops to noise, had taken on moisture and had to be warmed by the tunnel's fluorescent light. Fannie was putting firecrackers in the tunnel. Suddenly there was a "great big flash of light." Bits of glass flew into Fannie's eyes, but she managed to grope her way out.
When the explosion came, Kent's President Phil Wilmer was in his office. He ran outside just in time to see the second and worst explosion blast "B" Building's roof into the sky, as shrieking women streamed from under its crumbling walls. Wilmer picked up a bleeding, weeping woman, carried her to the plant gate.
The explosion's chain reaction reached 25 of the plant's 57 sheds and shacks, and all eight of the big wooden buildings. Packets of firecrackers shot aloft and burst in the air. As Kent's 300 workers, three-quarters of them women, ran for their lives, many of them crashed into the encircling wire fence. Some rebounded toward the single open gate; others climbed over; still others, with terror's unnatural strength, uprooted the fence and crawled under. Worker Mildred Reed dashed from the fiery plant with an armload of detonators, was knocked down ten times by flying splinters, but clung irrationally to her burden.
Frenzy's Snarl. Successive blasts jolted Chestertown for a full 50 minutes; then, for four hours, rockets sporadically whistled skyward and briefly flashed. Some townsfolk had seen a jet plane, or two, or three, flying over seconds before the first detonation. Others watched the grey cloud rise from the plant and thought it looked mushroom-shaped. Mothers gathered their children, put the little ones into baby buggies and trundled them through traffic across the Chester River Bridge. There Chestertown's southbound refugees tangled with rescuers headed north—civil defense disaster units, firemen and police from neighboring towns, the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and the National Guard.