A dynamite day at the sheriff’s office

WAUPACA – On Friday afternoon on May 1, a man walked into the Waupaca County Sheriff’s Office with some dynamite. He was not a terrorist; merely a concerned and cautious citizen that wanted to dispose of some dynamite he believed was from the 1920s. The dynamite was very old and in poor condition.
Old dynamite is extremely volatile and sensitive to shock. It will also “sweat” nitroglycerin as it gets older and this forms crystals that makes it even more sensitive to handling. A stick of dynamite produces roughly one megajoule of energy
Deputies kept an eye on the dynamite until the joint Brown and Outagamie County Bomb Squad arrived. Their bomb technicians hauled it off to blow it up in a safe location. On standby in case of a ka-boom were officers or staffers from the Waupaca Police Department, Wisconsin State Patrol, City of Waupaca Public Works, Waupaca County Highway, Waupaca Fire Department, and Gold Cross Ambulance Service.

Farming with dynamite
Coming across some old dynamite is unusual but not surprising. At one time, northern Wisconsin was awash in dynamite. At the start of the last century, thousands of lumberjacks departed the woods in northern Wisconsin and migrated to the Pacific Northwest for more logging work. The great white pineries of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan were denuded and the great log drives on the rivers came to a close. Hundreds of sawmills shut down. The loggers left behind vast acreages of stump-studded fields.

The lumber barons sold off the deserted land to settlers eager to homestead and to farm a place of their own. County officials wanted more farms on the tax rolls. State officials likened this area of northern Wisconsin to a new frontier that could be transformed into a bountiful agriculture region.
The problem was all the stumps. Many devices were invented to remove them. One was a tripod affixed over the stump with a giant screw mounted in the center. A rod extended outward to a horse that would walk in circles around the stump and the screw’s bite and mechanical advantage would uproot the stump.
Despite the ingenuity of the frontiersmen, stump removal was still a laborious and time-consuming task. The quickest way to get rid of a stump was to blow it up.
Like the modern UW-Extension role in helping farmers, the Wisconsin College of Agriculture led the way for educating farmers on how to use dynamite, and later, TNT, for blowing stumps. They published their first bulletin about it in 1912 and later they toured northern Wisconsin in train cars and trucks and gave demonstrations on how to blow up stumps. Thousands of farmers would attend these events.
The end of World War I left a surplus of TNT and H.L. Russell, Dean of the College of Agriculture, got his hands on a lot of it. He was able to sell the paraffin-coated newspaper cartridges of TNT to Wisconsin farmers for one-third of the market price. TNT is safer to handle than dynamite and as more farmers became informed of its use, more orders came in.
Between 1919 and 1928, Wisconsin farmers ordered 19 million pounds of explosives for blowing up tree stumps. At the time, that was one-third of all explosive use in the United States combined.