It was a quiet evening on April 26, 1919, in Kitzmiller. Estelle Cora Lyons and her children, John and Ida, were sleeping peacefully.
Estelle’s husband, Richard, wasn’t home, so Ida was sleeping with her mother in the bedroom while John slept in a small room at the back of the house.
Then came the explosion. It shook the house, ripping it apart in areas.
Pictures fell to the floor and windows shattered. Dynamite had exploded.
“Evidently the charge consisted of two or three sticks of the explosive and was set off by a time fuse, for considerable damage was done to the front of the house as also the contents of a front room,” The (Oakland) Republican reported.
“The door was entirely destroyed, door frame and sill badly splintered, window glass broken into fragments and considerable other damage resulting. Chairs and other furniture inside the room were reduced to kindling wood.”
The Lyonses were thrown suddenly awake and looked for a way out of the house immersed in darkness that was no longer the way they remembered it.
The dynamite had been placed against the doorsill of the home.
It was a miracle that none of the family were injured, particularly since, according to The Republican, Estelle and Ida “were sleeping in a room immediately above that where the explosion took place.”
Awakened by the explosion, neighbors quickly arrived to help. They checked over the Lyonses to make sure none of them had serious injuries.
One of the neighbors had the foresight to shut off the gas to the house. The explosion had disconnected the stove from the gas line, and gas was leaking into the damaged home, threatening to cause a secondary explosion should someone strike a match in the wrong place.
None of the reports mentioned where Richard Lyons was when this happened, but seeing that it was Saturday, he may have been drinking at a bar with friends. He worked a half day for the Hamill Coal & Coke Co. in town on Saturdays and then had Sundays off. Saturday was his only night off to do something enjoyable, like sharing drinks at a bar.
The following day, authorities started an investigation. The state’s attorney reported, “But nothing definite in the way of a clue as to the perpetrator of the outrage was secured,” The Republican reported.
No motive was ever identified as to why the Lyonses were attacked. The case was never solved and was never mentioned again in the newspapers.
That could be because Garrett County seems to have had a love/hate relationship with dynamite over the years. It was certainly needed to help with the numerous coal mining operations in the county, but it was also the cause of serious accidents, attempted murders, murders and even suicide.
In 1935, dynamite was used to destroy a car driven by Carl Trickett. The explosion killed Trickett and his housekeeper, Martha Davis, and injured his two children.
In 1938, in an odd incident, World War I veteran Edison Riley Roy, who was suffering from failing health, committed suicide using dynamite. “Roy used a stick of dynamite, placing it under his head and discharging it by means of a battery,” The Republican reported.
In 1930, William Stein was part of a road crew working on the Altamont-Kitzmiller Road. Eleven dynamite charges were placed and 10 detonated. Stein didn’t realize one charge hadn’t detonated and started to approach the area. His boss tried to warn him off, but Stein didn’t hear him. He reached the area, and the final charge detonated, killing him.
Multiple incidents over the years involved injuries from either dynamite or dynamite caps exploding accidentally.
Given how deadly dynamite incidents could be, the Lyons family was very lucky. Things could have gone a lot worse.