Lawrenceville

Allegheny Cemetery

Lawrenceville cemetery and the 1862 arsenal dead

Allegheny Cemetery opened in 1844 on the hills of Lawrenceville, above the river. One section of it belongs to a single afternoon, the same day as Antietam.

The Allegheny Arsenal covered about thirty acres between the river and what is now Penn Avenue, from 39th Street to 40th. It had been a federal post since 1814. On the afternoon of 17 September 1862 the laboratory, where paper cartridges were filled, exploded three times and burned. Colonel John Symington commanded the arsenal. Seventy-eight workers died, most of them girls and women. It was the worst civilian loss of life on the Union home front in the war, and the battle in Maryland pushed it off the front pages.

Families claimed the dead they could name. The rest were buried together. A marble shaft went up in 1863 and wore down until it could not be read. The monument that replaced it, in Section 17, was dedicated on 27 May 1928. The old words are cut into the new stone: forty-five people in the common grave, and the line that calls the day “a horrid memento of a most wicked rebellion.” All seventy-eight names are listed. No cause was ever fixed. The account that lasted is a spark off a horse’s shoe, or off a wagon wheel, in loose powder on the road up to the laboratory porch.

Near that monument, the story people repeat is of girls. The cemetery is open to walk. It does not run a ghost tour. It does publish a map of the Civil War burials.

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Lawrenceville