On a Friday the 13th, 1863, an explosion in the Confederate Ordinance Laboratory on Brown's Island in the James River near Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond kills 69 people, 62 of them women and young girls.

In Department 6, the condemned cartridges were broken open and separated, the bullets into one receptacle and the powder into another. Seventy females were at work there on that day, among them was an 18-year-old girl, one of the factory's older female workers.

As she attempted to extract the black powder from a defective friction primer, a percussion cap got mixed in with the powder and created an explosion. The chain reaction that followed destroyed the building.