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A few miles south of Uniontown PA you follow an old road through the wooded hills past a dwindling number of houses and trailers until it's just dirt and rocks. You take a left and go over an alarmingly sagging wood bridge and find a cinderblock shoebox of a backwoods bar.
This was one of the only bits of info we had on how to find where we were going today. The parking lot of the bar, surrounded by woods, some trailers, chained up hunting dogs, and random bits of equipment. The owner was outside sighting his guns, and came over to say hello.
One of the dogs was off leash and ran up to me, an old black and grey mutt. We asked the guy where to find the powder mill, and he gave me some very quick directions. I asked how much further we could get there by driving, and he said "well, here!". He let us park there.
We got our boots and packs on and I pulled up the rough map I'd assembled from unofficial hiking recordings on All trails and set off. We passed the guy's house at the edge of the woods, alongside what I think was his bbq smoking shed.
You had to go past this gate and up a mountain on a path closed in by rhododendrons. Couple miles of that, uphill.
The map I had found was quickly revealed to be sort of useless beyond knowing where a few waypoints were (I think the gps coverage was very spotty when it was revording, so we hiked up the mountain, found a trail in the direction we were going, and walked back down going north.
in the early 1900s there was a big powder mill complex back up in there. in 1905 it exploded. like, all of it. all 11 buildings and 2 train cars full of dynamite. 19 workers were just straight up vaporized. windows in surrounding towns shattered. they heard it in the next county.
after that, Dupont came in and built a new powder mill. there were further explosions in 1911, 1917, and on and on. this place simply could not stop exploding and killing local workers and sometimes their children who had just arrived to bring them lunch. sorry kid.
papers at the time mentioned that the bosses blamed this on sabotage, and held that the company bore no responsibility. they chalked it up to disgruntled or incompetent workers, or angry townsfolk who straight up resented the powder mill still being there at all.
a guy who died in the 1917 explosion was related to a guy who died in the 1911 one, and people had told him hey don't work there and he was like aaaah it'll be fine. it was not fine.
The ruins are pretty far out there. To give some context of how remote this place is: no vandalism, no graffiti, almost no trash. Just beer cans left by local hunters. It was small game season when we were out and guns were popping off in the distance the whole time.
I don't know how else to describe it except pristine.
There is so much stuff back there.
Across a scummy pond one giant smokestack remains.
Pictures as usual don't capture the scale well but you can spot Bethany in the last pic here if you want to get an idea of how massive this thing is. Remarkably well preserved too. Just been sitting back here for a century plus. These trees weren't here when it was built.
There's much more to the complex but we were running out of daylight and it took us 2.5 hours to hike there. So we all but sprinted back over the mountain, getting to the car right as dark closed in. Need to return sometime when we have sufficient hours for a more complete tour.
So... to be continued. I feel like this will eventually be a two-parter.
Last bit- the guy at the bar warned us about the hunters out today, but i said we were aware and we were going to wear some orange, and he seemed satisfied. I asked him what season it was and he said "just small game... lucky for you, BEAR SEASON ended wednesday!"
What he meant is that you are more likely to be mistaken by a hunter for a bear than a groundhog, but I did for a second think he was calling me a bear.
