Monroe, June 18—The bodies of Mansfield Blakney, Amos Richardson and Lewis Brewer, colored men who composed the dynamite squad at the Bonsal quarry near Pageland, were blown into fragments and scattered over a radius of 500 yards when 10 cases of dynamite went off by accidental explosion.
The three men had tamped six cases of the explosive in four holes, and as Brewer sat on two cases with two other cases near him, finishing the tamping in the fourth hole, the 10 cases carried out a little while before went off as one shot. The explosion was with such force that people throughout the whole county knew that an accident had occurred and gathered at the granite quarry by the hundreds. So completely were the bodies of the men and their clothes destroyed that not one bit was found large enough for identification.
Three other operatives were some distance away and were not badly hurt. All workers, it is reported, left the quarry on account of fright from the accident and refused to assist in gathering the fragments of the dead men. The truck drivers drove their machine near enough to learn what had happened and there abandoned them.
From the front page of The Concord Daily Tribune, June 19, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-06-19/ed-1/seq-1/
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