Virginia Vignettes

The idea for the explosion at the Battle of the Crater came from Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania, a regiment of anthracite miners. One of his men looked out at the Confederate position and declared, “We could blow that … fort out of existence if we could run a mine shaft under it.” The army’s engineers thought this to be “claptrap and nonsense,” because the tunnel would need to be longer than 400 feet, which would preclude proper ventilation. Pleasants got the go-ahead anyway, and on June 25, 1864, his men started digging. The Confederates who manned the fort could hear the sound of shovels 20 feet under their shoes and carved out “listening shafts” in an effort to locate the source. They never did, and when the noise stopped on July 23, they quit looking. They shouldn’t have. By then, the T-shaped tunnel was 511 feet long. The miners had installed lumber to stabilize it and instituted drainage and ventilation systems that worked regardless of what the engineers had claimed. On July 28, the Pennsylvanians began packing it with four tons of explosives. It promised to be the largest man-made blast in the Western Hemisphere to that point.

Further Reading:

Michael A. Cavanaugh and William Marvel, The Petersburg Campaign: The Battle of the Crater, “The Horrid Pit,” June 25-August 6, 1864 (1989)

This Vignette Provided By

Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia