During the 1850s, the Northern Central Railroad took shape along the east bank of the Susquehanna River between Harrisburg and Sunbury.
This ambitious project required massive construction efforts, including rock-blasting and hauling supplies through rugged terrain in northern Dauphin County.
One vivid eyewitness account of this vast construction project comes from Henry Keiser, who grew up in Wiconisco Township and remembered a hair-raising near accident he experienced as a teenager while delivering explosive powder for the railroad’s construction.
As rail lines expanded across Pennsylvania, drilling and blasting mountainsides became a daily occurrence. This arduous work was often left to laborers who risked their lives handling explosive powder, especially in the era before modern safety standards and regulations.
Keiser, reflecting on those formative years decades later, detailed how he narrowly escaped disaster while transporting explosive powder for the construction of the NCRR, an event he felt more dangerous than any experience he had during the Civil War a decade later.
His firsthand story provides a window into the hazards of constructing a major transportation route in the mid-19th century.
About 1852-53, my father built a powder mill, dry house, and storage house, south of Lykens, along Rattling Creek near the second bridge from Lykens, what is now known as the Glen…
Father furnished powder to the mines for several years, and later, when the Northern Central Railroad was built up by Clarks Ferry, Millersburg, and up to the Susquehanna River north, in 1854-1855, he furnished powder to William McKissick, of Millersburg, Pa., who had the contract of building the road around the head of the mountain at Clarks Ferry.
I as a boy of 14 or 15 years, delivered the powder in a one-horse wagon. 50 to 60 wooden kegs, 25 pounds to a keg, was considered a load. Crossed Berry’s Mountain at Elizabethville, made the trip in one day early in the morning and late at night. Also delivered several loads to a section across the canal at Harrisburg, Pa. This trip took two days, crossing Berry and Peter’s mountains.
One time Henry Hoffman and myself, while taking a load of powder to the section across the canal at Harrisburg, met with a large drove of cattle (several hundred) going in the same direction.
They were going very slow and taking up the entire width of the road, with no place to pass them. As we had a certain time in which to make our trip, we could not afford to move along slowly in rear of the drove, we decided to work our way slowly thru the herd. When we were about in the middle, some distance north of Dauphin on the river road, the head of the drove came to a steam saw mill on the left of the road, in full blast. The leaders became scared and started to stampede to the rear, the rest of the drove start along back as the stampeding cattle reached them.
There we were in the middle of the wild, crazy bunch of cattle with a load of powder, liable to be upset any second, to be blown up with the powder, or trampled to death by the cattle.
Our poor horse was on his haunches against the wagon and could not move either way, while the wagon rocked like a cradle by the steers passing on either side, thus keeping the wagon upright. Thru God’s mercy we escaped. Comrade Hoffman and myself went through the Civil War in 1861-1865 and I venture to say that we were never nearer death than we were on that stampede.
Read more about Henry Keiser – Civil War veteran
Henry Keiser’s ‘reminisicences’ of Lykens and Wiconisco before the Civil War
Meet Henry Keiser – A Soldier Who Kept A Diary For Nearly Every Day of the Civil War
A Lykens Civil War soldier’s close brush with death at the Battle of Cedar Creek, October 1864
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