What Was the Great Molasses Flood of 1919?

What Was the
Great Molasses Flood of 1919?
 
January 15, 1919, was a warm day in Boston, Massachusetts—­almost forty degrees by noon. That wouldn’t count as “warm” in most places, but during the previous few days, temperatures had been close to zero. Near Boston Harbor, where there was a constant wind blowing in from the sea, it had seemed even colder.

That day may have felt like a short holiday from winter, but it was business as usual in the crowded area near the harbor. Ships and trains came and went, loading and unloading their cargo. Adults were hard at work. Kids went to school.

But then, everything changed.

At 12:41 p.m., Robert Johnson was standing on the deck of the Bessie J., a US Navy ship anchored in Boston Harbor. Suddenly, he heard a loud rumbling sound from shore.

H. P. Palmer, an accountant, heard the rumbling from his office building near the harbor. As Palmer looked up, the entire building began to shake.

The firefighters at Engine 31 were playing cards and talking when they heard a booming crash. One of them ran to the window. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “Run!”

Boston Police patrolman Frank McManus headed toward the callbox on Commercial Street. It was time for his regular check-­in with police headquarters. As he began to call in his report, he heard a sound like shots fired from a gun. McManus turned around just in time to see the enormous molasses tank on Commercial Street collapse. As a wave of thick dark liquid rushed from it, the patrolman yelled into the phone, “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately—­there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!”

It almost sounds silly at first. A monster wave of molasses oozing down a city street?

But there was nothing funny about the molasses flood. When the fifty-­foot-­high molasses tank burst apart that day, it released 2.5 million gallons of the sticky syrup, killing and injuring people and animals. The flood knocked down buildings and railroad tracks. It caused about $100 million (in today’s money) worth of property damage.

What had gone wrong? And why was there a giant tank filled with molasses in one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city of Boston?

 
 
Chapter 1
The North End
 
The North End is one of Boston’s oldest neighborhoods, located right next to the busy harbor, where ships brought plenty of business to the area. There, the early English colonists had built wharves where ships from all over the world could dock, and warehouses to store their goods. Wealthy merchants kept offices near the harbor and lived in grand mansions nearby. By the middle of the 1700s, the North End had become one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods.

That changed in the 1800s. The North End stayed busy. But there was so much noise and traffic that the people who had become rich from all the businesses there left for fancy new neighborhoods.

There was still a lot of activity around the docks. But the rest of the North End was neglected. Buildings fell apart. Trash piled up in the streets. It was no longer a safe part of the city. Many Bostonians stayed away from the North End.

But not everyone. In the 1820s, Irish immigrants began to move into the area. It was one of the few places they could afford to live. They packed into tenement houses in a small part of the North End. Tenements were larger old buildings that had been carved up into small apartments. Families crowded into one-­ or two-­room apartments where disease spread quickly.

In time, many Irish immigrants settled into their lives in America and began to earn more money. They moved out of the North End and Jewish people from Eastern Europe moved in. But they also left the North End tenements when they eventually became more successful. The next wave of immigrants came from Italy. By 1900, there were fourteen thousand Italian immigrants living in Boston’s North End.

Like the Irish and Jewish people before them, the Italians faced discrimination. Just as they had been of the Irish, Americans were suspicious of their Catholic religion. Italians from places in southern Italy, like Sicily, faced racism because of their darker skin. Their food and its smells seemed strange to older, more established Bostonians. To them, the Italians just didn’t seem “American enough.”

Many Italian immigrants worked at jobs on the docks. They were laborers in the warehouses and the train yards. Others built small businesses in the neighborhood. They sold fruit from carts on the street or opened tailor shops or grocery stores. There were Italian doctors, dentists, and banks in the North End.

Families were close. They learned to help each other with life in the United States. Women cared for each other’s children. They leaned out their windows to share news with neighbors in the next building.

In 1910, about twenty-­eight thousand Italian immigrants were living in the North End. They were packed into a residential area (where their homes were) that measured less than half a square mile. The commercial part of the neighborhood (where the industry and businesses were) was jam-­packed, too. The city of Boston had buildings for stonecutters, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Carts pulled by horses squeezed past trucks with motors. Offices nearby were filled with employees. And the docks that had been busy for hundreds of years were still there. Several railroad lines crisscrossed around the docks, carrying goods in and out of Boston. In the early 1900s, the Boston Elevated Railway Company had built trains on tracks that ran above the streets. Elevated trains rumbled over the busy North End all day.

It was one of the busiest, most crowded parts of the city. And in 1915, a business called United States Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) decided it was the perfect place to build a giant molasses storage tank.

 
 
Chapter 2
A Rush to Build
 
 
Molasses is sweet, but it has a bitter history in the United States. Beginning in the early 1600s, molasses was a key part of the “triangular trade”—­the path of the transatlantic slave trade. This route was shaped by the winds and currents between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

So, what exactly is molasses? And why is it so important?

Molasses is a thick, dark syrup that comes from the sugar-­making process. The plant that is raw sugarcane is crushed and boiled until it forms crystals. The crystals are sugar. The leftover syrup is molasses. The sugarcane crystals can be boiled again and again until they are white and there is no molasses left in them. That is the white sugar people use most often at home and add to coffee or tea. Brown sugar still has some molasses left in it. Although molasses can be found in popular recipes for cookies, candy, sweet breads, and pies, it can also be turned into a form of alcohol that’s used to make alcoholic drinks and liquor, like rum.

The Triangular Trade
 
In the 1600s and 1700s, European and American ships regularly sailed to the west coast of Africa. They traded goods like cloth and rum for human beings, whom they enslaved. The enslaved African people were shipped to the American colonies and to the Caribbean. They were forced to work on plantations that grew sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton. Sugar, tobacco, and cotton were put onto ships and sent to Europe from the Americas, where they were sold and also used to make cloth and rum. Then the cycle began all over again.

As the plantation system in the southern colonies grew, New England ships began to sell enslaved people directly to those plantation owners. Disagreements over the issue of enslaving people eventually led to the US Civil War, and then to many long-standing inequalities for Black people in the United States. And molasses played a key role in that.

But alcohol made from molasses can be used in industry, too. By the late nineteenth century, cheap molasses alcohol was commonly used in cleaning products, dyes, and other materials. This was known as industrial alcohol. And this is the product the United States Industrial Alcohol Company specialized in.

There was yet another purpose for alcohol made from molasses: ammunition. Industrial alcohol was used to make gunpowder. It helped guns shoot bullets and made bombs explode. And in 1915, guns and bombs were both very important.

By late 1915, the Great War, later known as World War I, had been raging in Europe for more than a year. The United States wasn’t yet part of the war. President Woodrow Wilson told Americans that they would stay out of it, but many believed that the United States would eventually become involved in the fighting.

Some American businesses were already involved in the war in Europe. USIA was one of them. The company imported molasses from the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and Cuba to its factories and their molasses storage tanks in New York and Baltimore. They also had a factory for processing molasses into alcohol in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston.

The company knew they needed a storage tank in Boston to receive the molasses from ships and to store it for the East Cambridge factory. Arthur P. Jell was a treasurer at USIA. He kept track of the company’s money. Jell was put in charge of building the Boston tank. It was very important to the company. Jell believed that if he did a good job, he would get promoted to a more important position.

Arthur Jell found the perfect spot for the tank. It was close to the waterfront and the railroad. Ships would be able to easily pump their cargo of molasses into the tank, and then it could be pumped out again into nearby railway cars that would take it to USIA’s factory. The only people  living in the area were the Italian immigrants, and Jell and USIA knew that they wouldn’t complain about the tank being nearby. They didn’t have any power in the city of Boston.

The land was owned by the Boston Elevated Railway Company. In January 1915, Jell began talks with the railway company about renting the land. But they didn’t come to an agreement until late September, and USIA wouldn’t be allowed to start work on the site until November 1.

This was a huge problem. USIA had a ship full of molasses scheduled to arrive in Boston Harbor on December 31. The tank needed to be ready in just two months. If it wasn’t, the molasses might have to be dumped at sea. The company would lose money, and Jell’s reputation would suffer.
 
World War I
 
World War I started as a conflict between the Austro--Hungarian Empire and Serbia. The dual monarchy of the countries Austria and Hungary controlled the country of Bosnia, where a number of Serbians lived. Many outside Serbians wanted to free the Bosnian Serbs so they could unite as one Serbian nation. On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip decided to show the Austro--Hungarian emperor they were serious. He shot and killed the emperor’s nephew, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife while they were visiting Sarajevo, a city in Bosnia. The angry Austro--Hungarians declared war on Serbia on July 28.

The Austro--Hungarians had an agreement with Germany that they would help each other if one was attacked. The Serbians had a similar agreement with France and Great Britain. Soon, countries all over Europe had been dragged into the war. And in April 1917, so was the United States.

The war lasted until November 1918. Over eight million soldiers died. More than twenty million were injured. People called it the Great War because no one had ever seen such a big conflict. They also called it the War to End All Wars, because no one could imagine anyone starting another war like it. But they were wrong. In 1939, World War II began.

It took a month for the foundation of the tank to be built. At the beginning of December, the steel plates from the Hammond Iron Works arrived from Pennsylvania. Now they had to be riveted (fastened) together, piece by piece, to form the tank. Jell arranged to have men work night and day in order to finish in time. But storms shut down work a few times during the month. And Christmas was another lost day of work.

Finally, the last piece of steel was riveted into place on December 29. The finished tank stood fifty feet high from the ground to its roof—­about five stories tall! It was even taller than the elevated railroad tracks, which were thirty feet above street level. The tank was ninety feet wide and measured 240 feet around.

In its contract, Hammond Iron Works had stated that USIA should first test the tank by filling it with water. But Jell knew it would take many days to pump millions of gallons of water into the tank. It would also cost money to get that much water from the city. Jell decided he didn’t have the time or the money. Instead, he had the huge tank filled with just six inches of water! This was only a tiny fraction of the 2.5 million gallons it could hold when full. It didn’t leak, and that was good enough for Jell.

A few days later, on December 31, 1915, a tanker ship full of molasses arrived in Boston Harbor. The ship’s crew pumped its liquid cargo into the tank.

Arthur Jell had met his deadline, and no money was lost for the company. His bosses at USIA would be very pleased with him.