October 5, 2009 • 17 mins
Today, people associate molasses with cookies and other sweets. Yet in 1919 molasses was used in munitions as well as food -- and Boston had one of the biggest tanks around. Learn how molasses flooded Boston in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert, joined by Sarah Dowdy. How are you, Sarah?
I'm great? How are you? Katie? Could um? Today we're
going to be talking about a story that sounds funny
(00:24):
but it's really not. And to give you a little intro,
some days when it's hot in Boston, even today, people
claim you can smell molasses. Why would they say that, Sarah, Well,
to tell you, we're going to have to go back
to nineteen fifteen, when molasses was a much more important
commodity than it is today. Right. I think the only
(00:46):
thing I've ever used molasses for is maybe to make
cookies con pie. Yeah. So they're constructing a tank in Boston,
and this tank is a big deal. They've got thirty
men working around the clock to build it, and it's
behind schedule because there were all sorts of permits and
stuff that had to be acquired. But in nineteen fifteen,
(01:08):
the Purity Distilling Company, owned by the United States Industrial
Alcohol Company, was not thinking of baking cookies with their molasses. Rather,
they wanted to distill it and use it to make munitions.
So World War One is going on at the time,
and even though the United States isn't in the war yet,
they are supplying weapons munitions. So this is a big
(01:32):
industry and a lot of people are not happy about
our involvement in all of this. President Woodrow Wilson gets
a petition with more than a million signatures that basically
says to stop sending arms two countries that are at war.
But it's already underway. We're going to get involved, and
anarchists are not happy. So unhappy, they're setting fires, you know,
(01:55):
setting off bombs, making threats in New York City. Do
see two bombs go off in Boston in nineteen sixteen,
So this is a very um explosive time, no pun intended,
or was it? Italian anarchists in Boston's North End are
on watch. People are trying to make sure they're not
(02:16):
going to get into trouble. And that is where our
molasses tank comes in. So as the war is heating up,
the United States Industrial Alcohol and one of its subsidiaries,
the Purity Distilling Company, want to make a tank that
can hold a lot of molasses. It's a lucrative business.
This munitions manufacturing it is, and you want to have
(02:38):
your tank near the harbor because that's where the ships
come in with the loads of molasses from Cuba and
other countries. And you also want to have it near
the railroad where it can be taken off to get
processed and turned into grain alcohol. But if you want
such a prime piece of land, you're going to have
to file all sorts of permits and spend all kinds
(03:00):
of money to get it. So construction of this tank
ends up being a pretty lengthy process getting these permits
building it. Plus the construction isn't the best well, and
they're behind schedules, so they're much more willing to overlook
problems than they otherwise might have been. At the end,
they've got thirty men working around the clock to get
(03:22):
this thing finished, and a man dies during construction. There
are superstorms that December that end up with twenty inches
of snow in Boston. The rain, sleet, and wind are
so bad that two roller coasters end up completely destroyed.
And the guy in charge of this project is just
at his wits end. His name is Arthur gel and
just as one example of the shortcuts, he was willing
(03:45):
to take because he was running late on his deadline.
He only had six inches of water put in this
tank that holds two point five million gallons of molasses
to test for leaks, because you know, six inches in
a two points that covers the ba. Yes, and you'd
really call this a hard deadline that's approaching because there's
actually a shipment of molasses coming up to Boston, so
(04:09):
the tank tank really needs to be done or there's
nowhere for all this molasses to go. One for the
water thing, he realized not only would he have to
pay to tap into the municipal supply, it would have
taken weeks to fill. And he doesn't have weeks. He's
got days at this point. So this tank ends up
being really huge, even though it's not very well constructed.
(04:30):
It's fifty feet high, ninety feet in diameter, and it
holds more than two million gallons of molasses. And remember
molasses is a lot heavier than water, So this is
a This is a big, big tank. In fact, it's
so big it's something of a neighborhood fixture, a leaky
(04:51):
neighborhood fixture. It leaks so much that people come with
cans and little buckets to scrape off the leaks from
the tank to make lollipops, and the tank was painted
brown to hide some of the leaks, because naturally you
don't want to see a bunch of leaks in a
two point three million gallon tank. But we're going to
face forward now to nineteen nineteen. Munitions manufacturing no longer
(05:17):
the hot business to be in. But fortunately for the
United States Industrial Alcohol Company, there's another outlet for molasses
because people are trying to pass prohibition, the eighteenth Amendment,
and so you want to get as much alcohol as
you can made before that goes through. So you want
(05:39):
to make sure that your enormous molasses tank is full
to the brim um, weighing twenty six million pounds. When
it's full, that's a lot of alcohol, a lot of molasses.
Neighbors and workmen have long reported ominous rumbling sounds coming
from this tank. There was a guy who worked there
who would even go in the middle of the night
(06:00):
to make sure the tank had not exploded because something
about it just wasn't right. But it turns out you
wouldn't need to go check to see if the tank exploded.
You would definitely know, and people unfortunately learned this the
hard way. January nineteen nineteen at twelve thirty when the
tank exploded. First there was a roar, then an explosion,
(06:27):
followed by what sounded like the machine gun, which was
the steel bolts popping out of the tank, and the
steel plates of the tank were torn apart and propelled
in all directions. So this was wasn't just a big leak.
It actually exploded and the flying plates cut the girders
of the l in A fifteen foot high, one hundred
and sixty foot wide wave races through North End at
(06:51):
thirty five miles per hour, And it sounds ridiculous, but
you have to think of this huge, fast wave of thick,
sludgy molasso, lions of gowns and molasses just plummeting down
twenty six million pounds of molasses. There were fragments of
metal two hundred feet away, and that original shock wave
(07:12):
from it exploding just flattened people. But as they were
getting up, there was a vacuum created by everything coming back,
and then they just fell down again. So there are
people and horses on the ground. As this wave is coming,
the elevated train is lifted off its rails, their buildings collapsing,
getting knocked off their foundations and getting buried. Yeah, the
three story engine thirty one firehouse is completely knocked off
(07:35):
its foundations. Electrical poles are falling over, and the wires
are sparking in the molasses, and the rivets, like we said,
are just shooting everywhere and bouncing off things. People died
from being asphyxiated or smothered, some of them were crushed.
There were horses shot by the police because they were
(07:55):
stuck in the molasses and there was no way to
get them out. There was a firefighter who was trapped
under beneath the firehouse and he managed to keep his
head above the molasses for a few hours before it's
the coming and going under, because how do you pull
someone out of a giant wave of molasses. The basements
of buildings were just filled to the first floor with molasses,
(08:15):
and it turned out that twenty one people died and
one hundred and fifty were injured. At least twenty horses
were killed, and the rescue effort for this ends up
being pretty extraordinary. The first and the scene or a
hundred and sixteen sailors from the USS Nantucket They're joined
by Boston Police and Red Cross and some army personnel.
(08:37):
They set up kind of a triage unit at the
Haymarket Relief Station. Um actually removing molasses from people's noses
and mouths so they could breathe. Um. The dead apparently
looked like they were covered in heavy oil skins because
they were just coated in molasses. The nurses are covered
(08:58):
in molasses. They have it in their hay are molasses
mixed with blood. It's just really nasty scene. And the
cleanup took months, months and months. As you can imagine,
can imagine what I mean, Just spill some molasses on
your countertop. It's kind of nasty. Try doing two point
three million gallons of it in an entire city. So
they used picks and chisels to get rid of the
(09:20):
molasses that it hardened, and otherwise tried to cut it
with seawater and sand. It turns the harbor brown until summer.
This is in January, and obviously the molasses gets tracked
all over the city too, so you can just imagine
months of stickiness in Boston as street car seats and
(09:43):
molasses phones and trolleys. It's just everywhere and Oddly enough,
the night after the disaster, when people are still cleaning,
church bells start ringing because prohibition had just become law
when Nebraska ratified the eighteenth Amendment. So only a month
later February nineteen nineteen, the blame game again. Somebody is
(10:06):
going to have to pay for this. Boston is spending
huge amounts of money. They're all these dead. Someone's going down, right,
And it turns into one of those evil corporations versus
you know, poor victimized families kind of trial. And at
first the chief Judge of the Boston Municipal Court holds
(10:26):
us I A guilty of manslaughter um, and the d
A presents the evidence to a grand jury and they
think that the tanks are built shodily. They agree to that,
but they don't go as far as manslaughter um. But
by nineteen twenty there have been a hundred nineteen separate
civil suits filed against the U. S I A. And
(10:50):
this trial is insane. Litigation for this takes over six years.
There's something like three thousand witnesses, thirty thousand pages of testimony,
undred exhibits, and there are so many lawyers involved. Supposedly
there wasn't enough room to actually hold all of them
in the courthouse. Well, it's a it's a very odd
(11:10):
sort of hearing too. The superior court judge, um, you know,
has so so many lawsuits here that he consolidates the
suits and appoints an auditor to hear the evidence and
issue a report about liability and damages, thinking that from
there the cases could proceed proceed to actual jury trials.
(11:32):
He was kind of hoping it would streamline the process,
but that didn't really with six years of litigation, I'm
gonna say, I don't know about things moved as slow
as molasses, okay, And typically as of the Evil Corporation,
the owners claimed that it was anarchists sabotage and Italian
(11:53):
anarchists had come and set a bomb off on their
tank and it exploded, and how could they possibly be
held guilty for something that these horrible America hating anarchistic
kind of reminds me of Sacco and Vinceti reminds me
a lot. At the same time, the Italian immigrant scapegoats
similar story, and no one thought this was particularly credible.
(12:15):
It was one of those things where you know, you'd
think they'd issue a public apology, but instead they were
trying to blame it on the poor anarchists. Yeah, and
they're saying that there had been threats against the tank.
A bomb had been discovered in another USA a I
A facility, but they don't, like you said, they don't
have any actual proof for it. Well, and even then
(12:35):
it could have been true, but it was fairly clear
that that wasn't what caused this. They had a policeman
on guard at the tank to keep any anarchists with
ideas of explosions in their heads from getting too close. Meanwhile,
the plaintiffs are saying that the tank is the problem.
They're showing that the material is too thin. They had
an m I T professor who examined the shell and
(12:59):
said it was too then there weren't enough rivets. The
man in charge of construction was actually in finance and
didn't get any engineering advice on it coming. And like
we were talking about earlier, they're proving the construction was
rut rushed and the tank wasn't tested properly. When they
even used a much thinner kind of steel than they'd
(13:21):
actually said they were going to use in their permit,
so they weren't even truthful when they were applying for it.
So this hearing goes on for years, and eventually the auditor,
Hugh Ogden, um takes a whole year to review all
the information he's been presented with. It ends up being
the longest missed expensive civil suit in Massachusetts history. That's insane.
(13:45):
So Ogden ends up giving his verdict fifty one pages
of it in April, holding the company liable. He says
that the U. S i. A. Gave no support of
no evidence to support their anarch key theory, whereas he
had plenty of very convincing evidence on the shoddy construction
(14:06):
side when he said the factor of safety wasn't high
enough in this tank, So the tank wasn't even strong
enough for what they were doing with it. And because
of this trial, there were regulations put in place that
toughened up, you know, building regulations and specifically required that
engineers certified structural plans, which I can't imagine we didn't
(14:27):
have before. Then. Yeah, Boston requires that an architecture and
engineer actually sign off on the plans and that they
actually get filed through the city's Building department, something that
it seems inconceivable that that didn't exist already by two
point three million gallon tank by the twentieth century. It's
(14:48):
it's just surprising. The crazy thing is that no one
still knows what made that whole tank explode. There are
different theories, and one of them was that the molasses
fermented because the amperatures had gone at that time from
two degrees to forty two degrees within a few days
January day, so things were warming up and maybe that
(15:10):
caused the problem. Or maybe because that hold shipment of
new molasses was added on top and it was warmer
and the old stuff was colder, or the tank was overfilled,
or maybe there was just some sort of structural defect.
But we still don't know why it blew up. But
even though they don't know exactly what caused it to explode,
then Odden recommended pretty generous damages for the parties involved.
(15:34):
Six thousand going to the families of the deceased, twenty
five thousand to the City of Boston, which obviously had
to pay for this huge cleanup effort, and forty two
thousand to the Boston Elevated Railway Company, which had broken
girders probably prices to fix. Because these damages are so generous.
(15:56):
The lawyers for the us I quickly agree to out
of court settlements with um even slightly higher damages because
they don't want to go through the price of a
jury trial. Aside from the rumors that the smell of
molasses still lingers in the North End on a hot
summer day, um, the site is a park now has
(16:19):
botchy courts, so um because they cleaned it up all right,
maybe you should visit. This was a listener suggestion and
we read all of our reader emails, so we would
love it if you've dropped us a line at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can
also check out the blogs on the home page at
(16:40):
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History Class blog on the how stuff works dot com
home page.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert, joined by Sarah Dowdy. How are you, Sarah?
I'm great? How are you? Katie? Could um? Today we're
going to be talking about a story that sounds funny
(00:24):
but it's really not. And to give you a little intro,
some days when it's hot in Boston, even today, people
claim you can smell molasses. Why would they say that, Sarah, Well,
to tell you, we're going to have to go back
to nineteen fifteen, when molasses was a much more important
commodity than it is today. Right. I think the only
(00:46):
thing I've ever used molasses for is maybe to make
cookies con pie. Yeah. So they're constructing a tank in Boston,
and this tank is a big deal. They've got thirty
men working around the clock to build it, and it's
behind schedule because there were all sorts of permits and
stuff that had to be acquired. But in nineteen fifteen,
(01:08):
the Purity Distilling Company, owned by the United States Industrial
Alcohol Company, was not thinking of baking cookies with their molasses. Rather,
they wanted to distill it and use it to make munitions.
So World War One is going on at the time,
and even though the United States isn't in the war yet,
they are supplying weapons munitions. So this is a big
(01:32):
industry and a lot of people are not happy about
our involvement in all of this. President Woodrow Wilson gets
a petition with more than a million signatures that basically
says to stop sending arms two countries that are at war.
But it's already underway. We're going to get involved, and
anarchists are not happy. So unhappy, they're setting fires, you know,
(01:55):
setting off bombs, making threats in New York City. Do
see two bombs go off in Boston in nineteen sixteen,
So this is a very um explosive time, no pun intended,
or was it? Italian anarchists in Boston's North End are
on watch. People are trying to make sure they're not
(02:16):
going to get into trouble. And that is where our
molasses tank comes in. So as the war is heating up,
the United States Industrial Alcohol and one of its subsidiaries,
the Purity Distilling Company, want to make a tank that
can hold a lot of molasses. It's a lucrative business.
This munitions manufacturing it is, and you want to have
(02:38):
your tank near the harbor because that's where the ships
come in with the loads of molasses from Cuba and
other countries. And you also want to have it near
the railroad where it can be taken off to get
processed and turned into grain alcohol. But if you want
such a prime piece of land, you're going to have
to file all sorts of permits and spend all kinds
(03:00):
of money to get it. So construction of this tank
ends up being a pretty lengthy process getting these permits
building it. Plus the construction isn't the best well, and
they're behind schedules, so they're much more willing to overlook
problems than they otherwise might have been. At the end,
they've got thirty men working around the clock to get
(03:22):
this thing finished, and a man dies during construction. There
are superstorms that December that end up with twenty inches
of snow in Boston. The rain, sleet, and wind are
so bad that two roller coasters end up completely destroyed.
And the guy in charge of this project is just
at his wits end. His name is Arthur gel and
just as one example of the shortcuts, he was willing
(03:45):
to take because he was running late on his deadline.
He only had six inches of water put in this
tank that holds two point five million gallons of molasses
to test for leaks, because you know, six inches in
a two points that covers the ba. Yes, and you'd
really call this a hard deadline that's approaching because there's
actually a shipment of molasses coming up to Boston, so
(04:09):
the tank tank really needs to be done or there's
nowhere for all this molasses to go. One for the
water thing, he realized not only would he have to
pay to tap into the municipal supply, it would have
taken weeks to fill. And he doesn't have weeks. He's
got days at this point. So this tank ends up
being really huge, even though it's not very well constructed.
(04:30):
It's fifty feet high, ninety feet in diameter, and it
holds more than two million gallons of molasses. And remember
molasses is a lot heavier than water, So this is
a This is a big, big tank. In fact, it's
so big it's something of a neighborhood fixture, a leaky
(04:51):
neighborhood fixture. It leaks so much that people come with
cans and little buckets to scrape off the leaks from
the tank to make lollipops, and the tank was painted
brown to hide some of the leaks, because naturally you
don't want to see a bunch of leaks in a
two point three million gallon tank. But we're going to
face forward now to nineteen nineteen. Munitions manufacturing no longer
(05:17):
the hot business to be in. But fortunately for the
United States Industrial Alcohol Company, there's another outlet for molasses
because people are trying to pass prohibition, the eighteenth Amendment,
and so you want to get as much alcohol as
you can made before that goes through. So you want
(05:39):
to make sure that your enormous molasses tank is full
to the brim um, weighing twenty six million pounds. When
it's full, that's a lot of alcohol, a lot of molasses.
Neighbors and workmen have long reported ominous rumbling sounds coming
from this tank. There was a guy who worked there
who would even go in the middle of the night
(06:00):
to make sure the tank had not exploded because something
about it just wasn't right. But it turns out you
wouldn't need to go check to see if the tank exploded.
You would definitely know, and people unfortunately learned this the
hard way. January nineteen nineteen at twelve thirty when the
tank exploded. First there was a roar, then an explosion,
(06:27):
followed by what sounded like the machine gun, which was
the steel bolts popping out of the tank, and the
steel plates of the tank were torn apart and propelled
in all directions. So this was wasn't just a big leak.
It actually exploded and the flying plates cut the girders
of the l in A fifteen foot high, one hundred
and sixty foot wide wave races through North End at
(06:51):
thirty five miles per hour, And it sounds ridiculous, but
you have to think of this huge, fast wave of thick,
sludgy molasso, lions of gowns and molasses just plummeting down
twenty six million pounds of molasses. There were fragments of
metal two hundred feet away, and that original shock wave
(07:12):
from it exploding just flattened people. But as they were
getting up, there was a vacuum created by everything coming back,
and then they just fell down again. So there are
people and horses on the ground. As this wave is coming,
the elevated train is lifted off its rails, their buildings collapsing,
getting knocked off their foundations and getting buried. Yeah, the
three story engine thirty one firehouse is completely knocked off
(07:35):
its foundations. Electrical poles are falling over, and the wires
are sparking in the molasses, and the rivets, like we said,
are just shooting everywhere and bouncing off things. People died
from being asphyxiated or smothered, some of them were crushed.
There were horses shot by the police because they were
(07:55):
stuck in the molasses and there was no way to
get them out. There was a firefighter who was trapped
under beneath the firehouse and he managed to keep his
head above the molasses for a few hours before it's
the coming and going under, because how do you pull
someone out of a giant wave of molasses. The basements
of buildings were just filled to the first floor with molasses,
(08:15):
and it turned out that twenty one people died and
one hundred and fifty were injured. At least twenty horses
were killed, and the rescue effort for this ends up
being pretty extraordinary. The first and the scene or a
hundred and sixteen sailors from the USS Nantucket They're joined
by Boston Police and Red Cross and some army personnel.
(08:37):
They set up kind of a triage unit at the
Haymarket Relief Station. Um actually removing molasses from people's noses
and mouths so they could breathe. Um. The dead apparently
looked like they were covered in heavy oil skins because
they were just coated in molasses. The nurses are covered
(08:58):
in molasses. They have it in their hay are molasses
mixed with blood. It's just really nasty scene. And the
cleanup took months, months and months. As you can imagine,
can imagine what I mean, Just spill some molasses on
your countertop. It's kind of nasty. Try doing two point
three million gallons of it in an entire city. So
they used picks and chisels to get rid of the
(09:20):
molasses that it hardened, and otherwise tried to cut it
with seawater and sand. It turns the harbor brown until summer.
This is in January, and obviously the molasses gets tracked
all over the city too, so you can just imagine
months of stickiness in Boston as street car seats and
(09:43):
molasses phones and trolleys. It's just everywhere and Oddly enough,
the night after the disaster, when people are still cleaning,
church bells start ringing because prohibition had just become law
when Nebraska ratified the eighteenth Amendment. So only a month
later February nineteen nineteen, the blame game again. Somebody is
(10:06):
going to have to pay for this. Boston is spending
huge amounts of money. They're all these dead. Someone's going down, right,
And it turns into one of those evil corporations versus
you know, poor victimized families kind of trial. And at
first the chief Judge of the Boston Municipal Court holds
(10:26):
us I A guilty of manslaughter um, and the d
A presents the evidence to a grand jury and they
think that the tanks are built shodily. They agree to that,
but they don't go as far as manslaughter um. But
by nineteen twenty there have been a hundred nineteen separate
civil suits filed against the U. S I A. And
(10:50):
this trial is insane. Litigation for this takes over six years.
There's something like three thousand witnesses, thirty thousand pages of testimony,
undred exhibits, and there are so many lawyers involved. Supposedly
there wasn't enough room to actually hold all of them
in the courthouse. Well, it's a it's a very odd
(11:10):
sort of hearing too. The superior court judge, um, you know,
has so so many lawsuits here that he consolidates the
suits and appoints an auditor to hear the evidence and
issue a report about liability and damages, thinking that from
there the cases could proceed proceed to actual jury trials.
(11:32):
He was kind of hoping it would streamline the process,
but that didn't really with six years of litigation, I'm
gonna say, I don't know about things moved as slow
as molasses, okay, And typically as of the Evil Corporation,
the owners claimed that it was anarchists sabotage and Italian
(11:53):
anarchists had come and set a bomb off on their
tank and it exploded, and how could they possibly be
held guilty for something that these horrible America hating anarchistic
kind of reminds me of Sacco and Vinceti reminds me
a lot. At the same time, the Italian immigrant scapegoats
similar story, and no one thought this was particularly credible.
(12:15):
It was one of those things where you know, you'd
think they'd issue a public apology, but instead they were
trying to blame it on the poor anarchists. Yeah, and
they're saying that there had been threats against the tank.
A bomb had been discovered in another USA a I
A facility, but they don't, like you said, they don't
have any actual proof for it. Well, and even then
(12:35):
it could have been true, but it was fairly clear
that that wasn't what caused this. They had a policeman
on guard at the tank to keep any anarchists with
ideas of explosions in their heads from getting too close. Meanwhile,
the plaintiffs are saying that the tank is the problem.
They're showing that the material is too thin. They had
an m I T professor who examined the shell and
(12:59):
said it was too then there weren't enough rivets. The
man in charge of construction was actually in finance and
didn't get any engineering advice on it coming. And like
we were talking about earlier, they're proving the construction was
rut rushed and the tank wasn't tested properly. When they
even used a much thinner kind of steel than they'd
(13:21):
actually said they were going to use in their permit,
so they weren't even truthful when they were applying for it.
So this hearing goes on for years, and eventually the auditor,
Hugh Ogden, um takes a whole year to review all
the information he's been presented with. It ends up being
the longest missed expensive civil suit in Massachusetts history. That's insane.
(13:45):
So Ogden ends up giving his verdict fifty one pages
of it in April, holding the company liable. He says
that the U. S i. A. Gave no support of
no evidence to support their anarch key theory, whereas he
had plenty of very convincing evidence on the shoddy construction
(14:06):
side when he said the factor of safety wasn't high
enough in this tank, So the tank wasn't even strong
enough for what they were doing with it. And because
of this trial, there were regulations put in place that
toughened up, you know, building regulations and specifically required that
engineers certified structural plans, which I can't imagine we didn't
(14:27):
have before. Then. Yeah, Boston requires that an architecture and
engineer actually sign off on the plans and that they
actually get filed through the city's Building department, something that
it seems inconceivable that that didn't exist already by two
point three million gallon tank by the twentieth century. It's
(14:48):
it's just surprising. The crazy thing is that no one
still knows what made that whole tank explode. There are
different theories, and one of them was that the molasses
fermented because the amperatures had gone at that time from
two degrees to forty two degrees within a few days
January day, so things were warming up and maybe that
(15:10):
caused the problem. Or maybe because that hold shipment of
new molasses was added on top and it was warmer
and the old stuff was colder, or the tank was overfilled,
or maybe there was just some sort of structural defect.
But we still don't know why it blew up. But
even though they don't know exactly what caused it to explode,
then Odden recommended pretty generous damages for the parties involved.
(15:34):
Six thousand going to the families of the deceased, twenty
five thousand to the City of Boston, which obviously had
to pay for this huge cleanup effort, and forty two
thousand to the Boston Elevated Railway Company, which had broken
girders probably prices to fix. Because these damages are so generous.
(15:56):
The lawyers for the us I quickly agree to out
of court settlements with um even slightly higher damages because
they don't want to go through the price of a
jury trial. Aside from the rumors that the smell of
molasses still lingers in the North End on a hot
summer day, um, the site is a park now has
(16:19):
botchy courts, so um because they cleaned it up all right,
maybe you should visit. This was a listener suggestion and
we read all of our reader emails, so we would
love it if you've dropped us a line at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and you can
also check out the blogs on the home page at
(16:40):
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
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dot com. Let us know what you think, Send an
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