Last week I told you about the Twin Towers in Pleasant View and where they were. This week I will tell you about an event that happened just east of the Twin Towers in Pleasant View on Highway 41A toward Nashville.
This event happened on Friday night in March 24, 1950, at about 8:45 p.m. This event was talked about even till today by those who remembered and those who were told about it. We have never experienced anything like this before or since then.
On that fateful night there was a truck carrying 20,000 pounds of dynamite from the Hercules Powder Co. going toward the West on 41A. It was approaching the Twin Towers restaurant. Mr. E. E. Minis, who was driving a Wilson Freight truck, noticed smoke coming from the tractor and blinked his lights at the driver of the dynamite truck. This brought the Hercules Powder Co. truck to a stop. Mr. Lloyd Brantley was the driver. When he told Mr. Minis what he was hauling, they both ran down the road in opposite directions to warn other cars that were approaching. They succeeded in stopping most of the cars and very soon a huge ring of people gathered to watch the truck, which was very much on fire by now.
The explosion finally happened. It created a crater 45-feet wide and 25-feet deep in the concrete pavement. Flames shot over 100 feet into the air, which caused a forest fire 150 yards from the blast. There were chunks of concrete roadway blasted into the air weighing as much as 50 pounds. Two men in a car attempted to drive closer to the truck. When they got out of their car, the explosion killed both of them. The car was crushed. The two truck drivers warned them not to get close but they didn’t listen. Other cars were crushed by the blast and the people standing outside their vehicles were thrown to the other side of the road. They would have been killed if they had remained in their automobiles. It sheared utility poles that were close by and knocked out phone service and electric service in a dozen communities. It affected Robertson, Cheatham and Davidson counties and parts of Greenbrier. Windows in houses rattled from Nashville to Clarksville and were heard as far as the Kentucky border. The officers who arrived on the scene from Clarksville stated that they had seen the blast 32 miles away. One man, Mr. Omar Walker, who lived a half-mile away was thrown to the floor in his own house. It blew the windows out of his house and several other houses nearby…