The Giant Powder Company

Explosives manufacturing in the Bay Area got its start as a result of the evolving nature of the California Gold Rush in the mid 19th century. Although there was a stretch of time at the peak of the spell (1851-1852) in which amateur prospectors could easily find gold nuggets lying in the depths of various creeks through  traditional panning methods, specialized tools were quickly needed in order for people to even have a chance at extracting the element from ancient riverbeds where gold had been cemented for centuries.

This sudden surge in demand for the development of new techniques led capitalist financers to invest in cost-effective hydraulic mining as an enterprise. In hydraulic mining, workers blast high-pressure water cannons to cut through rocky mountainsides. Alongside hydraulic mining, industrial corporations were desperate to find a substance something more powerful than the typically used black powder of the time, but were unable to find a way to harness the unpredictable explosive nitroglycerin that they hoped would be the answer. 

A partial solution to this problem was ultimately found by Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel when he created a unique blasting cap that allowed him and his team in Europe to safely detonate powder from a distance —a characteristic that would later greatly assist with utilizing the material he called “dynamite” at future worksites. Nobel immediately took out a patent for his innovative design but quickly discovered that it was too volatile for commercial use. He decided then to further stabilize the explosive by adding diatomaceous earth to his special mix. 

In 1867, Nobel partnered up with and licensed his invention to the prolific San Francisco merchant Julius Bandmann and with this newly established partnership in his pocket, Bandmann that same year incorporated the first explosives manufacturing firm in the United States: the Giant Powder Company.

The Giant Powder Company built their first factory in the southern portion of San Francisco, in a location that is now known as Glen Canyon Park. Unfortunately, not even two years into operations, an explosion occurred on November 26th 1869, completely destroying the facilities. Two employees died instantly, and nine more were wounded severely.

The newspaper The Daily Alta California reported on the incident at the time and mentioned that the west side of the company housed “a shanty occupied by the eight Chinamen [sic] employed there [and that] at an elevation of about forty feet was the depository for the nitro-glycerine and acids used in manufacturing the powder.” Despite the fact that these highly skilled Chinese immigrant laborers (who were not eligible for citizenship at the time because of discriminatory governmental policies) were integral to sustaining Giant Powder as a commercial entity, they were purposely tasked with dangerous jobs for little pay. They also were forced to reside within the most hazardous sections of the plant. The Daily Alta California reinforces this point by noting that “of the eight Chinamen [sic] who were in the shanty at the time of the explosion, six were seriously injured, one of them having his eyes nearly burned out, and the others being burned in the face and other portions of the body.”

Despite this early setback, the Giant Powder Company quickly purchased one hundred acres of land west of their original location and rebuilt their facilities within the sand dunes adjacent to the present day Golden Gate Park, a geographic area that was chosen for its particular ability to mask the sound of potential blasts. Despite these precautions however, yet another series of high profile explosions sparked outrage amongst local residents who were tired of dealing firsthand with the environmental fallout of these accidents. 

In response to the nearly unanimous public outcry, Giant Powder relocated for a second time to a relatively remote, undeveloped piece of land along the West Berkeley shoreline (an area that is in Albany) that was separated by the bay from metropolitan San Francisco and Oakland. The new factory site was constructed on top of the rocky promontory Fleming Point which is the current home of the Golden Gate Fields racetrack grandstand.

Giant Powder made a considerable effort in the following few years to implement preventative safety measures, the most recognizable of which were the numerous eucalyptus tree groves planted by the company that dotted the coast in an attempt to shield the surrounding communities from the hazardous substances that went into creating dynamite. However, trees were not enough to protect neighboring communities from the factory’s accidental explosions.

On the morning of July 9th, 1892 when Giant Powder workers who were cleaning the inside of a mixing house accidentally ignited a batch of nitroglycerin. This set off a sequence of seven explosions that demolished the facilities and ultimately killed all employees on site.

The effects of the event reverberated for miles all across the surrounding area and the newspaper The San Francisco Call reported the very next day that the “force of the shock [was] sufficient to destroy the works absolutely and entirely, to shatter windows in houses 10 miles away, and to be felt within a radius of 30 to 40 miles.” Buildings right across the bay in San Francisco shook uncontrollably because of the blasts and hundreds of residential homes in the nearby city of Oakland were damaged. Even the University of California, Berkeley, located just four miles southeast of Fleming Point, felt the direct impact of the explosion which shattered nearly every glass window on campus instantly.  

The San Francisco Call went on to describe in the same piece under the subtitle “How the Chinese Fared: Even Their Race Enemies Were Compelled to Pity Them” that of the “145 persons employed at the works, by far the largest proportion are Chinese and the explosion fairly crushed the life and spirit out of the wretched coolies.” This point is especially vital when it comes to understanding why Chinese workers were always inevitably blamed and scapegoated for Giant Powder’s accidents in the press. 

Despite the fact that they were openly and continually exploited by higher ups, any instance where a Chinese worker’s life was lost due to conditions within the plants was brushed aside as being insignificant information. We can see reflections of that unfortunate attitude within a piece written by former President of the University of California Edward S. Holden in the publication Industry in which he flippantly notes that “The loss of life [due to the July 9th explosion] was happily very slight compared with what might be expected, most of the people after the first explosion making their way to some distance, so that the force of the explosion passed over them. The number reported killed is less than ten, of whom all but three were Chinamen [sic].”

The Giant Powder Company relocated one last time in 1892 to Point Pinole overlooking the San Pablo Bay and eventually merged in 1915 with its competitors Atlas Powder and Hercules Powder (the site of the latter company later developing into the city of the same name) where it continued to operate until around the end of World War II.

Nobel’s contribution to the explosives industry and his commercialization of dynamite as a tool that could be utilized within extractive gold mining work fundamentally transformed California into an industrial environment filled with wage laborers who asserted a level of previously unseen human control over the land. Because there were so many precious minerals in the Sierras, the mountain range became the main target for hydraulic mining companies which had devastating environmental effects in California that still affects us today.

Hydraulic miners pushed huge amounts of mud into the streams that flowed out from the Sierra and by the end of the 19th century, debris had drained into and polluted the entire San Francisco Bay. Mercury-laden sediment currently rests at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

Haunted by the fact that enormous amounts of avoidable suffering (against both humans but also the environment) occurred as a direct result of his innovation and with no heirs to his vast fortune that was accumulated in the Bay Area, Nobel established the prestigious Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and (of course) peace in an attempt to soften the blow of his complicated legacy.

Fittingly enough, UC Berkeley, directly adjacent to Fleming Point’s former Giant Powder facilities and from which you can catch a glimpse of the famous Campanile structure’s peak, eventually became the home of over one hundred Nobel prize winning faculty and counting.

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Special thanks to Dr. Seth Lunine, UC Berkeley, for his lecture on the California explosives industry. 

Header image: Dynamite explosion at the Albany Hill location of Judson Powder Works, a rival company to Giant Powder. Courtesy of the Albany Library.

For further reading:

Holden, Edward S. “Powder Explosion at West Berkeley, July 9, 1892,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Collection, September 3, 1892,  jstor_publastrsocipaci; jstor_ejc; additional_collections.

Keat, Wes, and Mark Earnest, “Terrible Accident: Total Destruction of the Giant Powder Works—Two Men Burned to Death—Seven Others Seriously Injured,” The Daily Alta California (San Francisco, November 27, 1869).

Mangravite, Andrew. “Meeting the Miner’s Friend,” Science History Institute, last modified December 9, 2017, accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/meeting-the-miners-friend.

Rose, Evelyn. “Explosive Revelation: Glen Canyon Ties to the Nobel Prize,” FoundSF (Glen Park News, n.d.), accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Giant_Powder_Company.

“The Historic Connection Between Alfred Nobel and Glen Canyon Park,” Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project (Independent Arts and Media, n.d.), accessed February 11, 2021, https://glenparkhistory.wixsite.com/glenparkhistory/place-the-plaque-giant-powder-compa.

“Blown Sky High! Disastrous Explosion At Judson Powder Works,” The San Francisco Call, July 10, 1892.

Monument to Dynamite Manufacturing

I planted this circle of poppies directly adjacent to Fleming Point, the location of the first dynamite manufacturing firm in the United States, in order to visually represent the shocks that reverberated from the explosions that occurred there. Golden poppies are the state flower of California and this monument highlights how dynamite placed a vital role in extracting gold and other minerals from the Sierra. California (and the entire American West) transformed into the capital-intensive, industrial environment that it is today because of this piece of forgotten East Bay history and the environmental impact of dynamite still haunts us to this day.

Next to the circle of poppies, there is a mosaic of dynamite by Lynn Jones. When you are at the Bulb, if you scan the mosaic with the Artivive app on your phone, a short slideshow of historic photos will play. 

You can see slideshow here by clicking on the image of the mosaic.