Qualla: 1946 Greenville Propane Explosion

1946 Greenville Propane Explosion: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mary Brown, Geraldine Simpson, and Mamie Earle were Black women working at the Ideal Laundry on the corner of Buncombe and Echols Streets when the building above them exploded. The blast killed all three of them and their superintendent, J. Carl Trammel, who had stayed inside to help direct the evacuation. A firefighter died too. So did one other person in the rubble. The official death toll was six. The injured numbered over 150. And the fire that followed reached nearly 600 feet into the November sky and was visible from Gaffney, fifty miles to the northeast. It was 6 PM on November 19, 1946.

1946 Greenville Propane Explosion: From Coal to Propane

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ideal Laundry had a problem with smoke. Its boilers had run on coal for years, and Greenville city officials had been leaning on the company since before the war to do something about the soot. So in the summer of 1946 the laundry's manager, E.R. Haynie, went looking for an a...

1946 Greenville Propane Explosion: Six Minutes

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the afternoon of November 19, the tank was filled to about half its capacity when workers noticed the leak. Haynie ordered the building evacuated and ran to the fire station a block away. Superintendent Trammel stayed inside to make sure the laundry employees got out. He almos...

1946 Greenville Propane Explosion: What the Maps Don't Show

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The northeast side of Greenville in 1946 was a Black neighborhood. The 1924 South Carolina Supreme Court decision in Allison v. Ideal Laundry mentioned 'nearly twenty' destroyed structures and lawsuits from homeowners, but the human geography behind that phrase rarely makes it in...

1946 Greenville Propane Explosion: Lessons in Stone

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two federal investigators from the United States Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh came down to Greenville to figure out what had gone wrong. Their report was straightforward: the system had been improperly constructed and installed. Their recommendations would become standard practi...