Jared Enoch Wade (1823-1870): California Powder Plant Explosion

  

AI Generated Image: Jared Enoch Wade

A Connecticut Man Who Made a Bang in California
(The Story of Jared Wade, 1830-1870)

If you follow the sound of progress in the 1870's California, you'll eventually find the boom coming from the banks of the San Lorenzo River.  That's where the California Powder Works turned peaceful forest air into black powder smoke--and where a Connecticut born laborer named Jared Wade, my 3x great grandfather met his untimely fate in one particularly thunderous April day. 

Jared, age forty, had come a long way from his New England roots being born in New Lyme, Connecticut.  He worked as a mariner and seaman in Connecticut before migrating to New York where the birth of his daughter Marion Wade and son Richard Beebe Wade took place. However, like many skilled workers of his time he likely followed opportunity westward, trading his work in New York for the booming industry in California ---literally booming---as it turned out.   He was one of hundreds who kept the Powder Works running, mixing, grinding, and glazing gunpowder for mining and railroads across the Pacific Coast.  

But one spring day in 1870, a grinding mill at the Powder Works exploded without warning.  The blast could be heard for miles around Santa Cruz.  When the smoke cleared, three men were gone in an instant--  Jared Wade, William Gilkey, of Pennsylvania, and John Thomas of Ireland--each of them husbands, workers, and unwitting martyrs of the age of industrial advancement.  Their deaths were recorded in the careful hand of a lens taker  as "Explosion at Powder Works---Instant"  The name John E. Wade is later corrected to reflect Jared Wade, sometimes spelled Waide or Waid. 

Newspapers.com Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, March 12, 1870 pg 2 

 The factory was rebuilt within weeks, business carried on, and the story of these men faded into the background hum of history.  Yet, in one small like of the 1870 Mortality Schedule (1), Jared's story survives, a quiet reminder that behind every census page lies a life, a family and sometimes a very loud ending.  

The California Powder Works --AKA "Boom Town on the River" 
It was nestled along the San Lorenzo River just north of Santa Cruz.  The California Powder Works was established in 1861 to supply gunpowder to the booming mining and railroad industries of the West.  Before its construction, every barrel of blasting powder had to be shipped around Cape Hope from the East Coast--a slow and dangerous trip.  So California built is own plant.  
At is peak, California Powder Works had more than a dozen small mills and "houses" each separated by earthen berms (and a good deal of wishful thinking) to prevent one explosion from setting off the next.  Despite those precautions, the works earned a reputation for occasional fireworks.  The April 1870 explosion as recorded here and additional explosions, 1879, 1880, 1887, 1892 and one in 1898 which was a massive explosion killing thirteen men and shattering windows all the way into town.  

Local lore says Santa Cruz residents could always tell a "Powder Works Day" --the air smelled fairly of sulfur, and the hills echoed with testing booms. 

By the early 1900's, safer methods and new regulations made the plant obsolete and the site was eventually converted in the Paradise Park Masonic Club, a quiet residential community.  But the ghosts of the old Powder Works---and a few brave men like Jared Wade---still linger in the records, where every boom is reduced to a single handwritten line. (2)

Family Note: Life Beside the River

Ellen (Mason) Wade, my 3x great-grandmother's role as a housekeeper at the California Powder Works placed her at the heart of the daily life in the company village.  Workers' families lived in neat, white-washed cottages along the river, with gardens, a company store, and a small school for the children--including the school Marion (Wade) Squires, my 2 x great-grandmother, then only nine years old would have attended. 

Per the 1870 census report Ellen Wade is now a widow and works as a boarding housekeeper.  She has four children that she is raising alone: William H - 13 y/o, Marion - 9 y/o, Richard - 5 y/o and Sarah - 1 y/o.  The two older kids, William and Marion are definitely old enough to carry the scar of this horrific time in their lives.  It is not know if Marion's exposure to this tragedy at such a young age, along with the death of her son John Francis, topped off with the desertion of her husband William Clayton all lead to her successful suicide at 48 years old. 

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Citations:

 (1) "Schedule 3-Persons Who Died during the year ending June 1, 1870", Santa Cruz County,  California, p. 917, entries for Jared Wade, William Gilkey, and John Thomas; citing NARA  microfilm publication T655, roll 7, U.S. Federal Mortality Schedules, 1850-1880.

 (2) Information about the California Powder Works and its bridge was drawn from the National  Register of Historic Places "California Powder Works Bridge" (Santa Cruz Sentinel Publishers, (1983). pp. 112-116