On the morning of Monday, May 5, 1879, an actual explosion rocked the city of Stratford to its core.  According to the Stratford Beacon in 1879, at approximately 9:30am, a box car loaded with 3750 pounds of vigorite powder, a powerful explosive prepared from nitro-glycerine, bound for the Detroit River near Amherstburg, Ontario was being shunted into position.  One moment everything was proceeding as per usual and the next an explosion tore the area to pieces; stomping out an unwanted ten-foot-deep-by-twenty-foot-diameter hole in the middle of the Grand Trunk yard; showering the rest of the yard with charred wooden splinters and twisted freight cars; blowing out every poor merchant’s storefront along Market Street; and shattering the windows and doors, as well as violently rearranging the furniture, of at least twenty houses in the surrounding neighbourhoods and even the town hall. 

 So terrific was the blast, in fact, that the shockwave was felt as far as Shakespeare, Tavistock, St. Marys and even Milverton; no doubt causing every citizen to turn their heads towards the direction of Stratford and wonder, “What in the world was that noise?” Miraculously, out of the multiple people injured, only two were killed.  Switchman Francis Pigeon was literally blown to pieces as he took the brunt of the explosion whilst guiding the locomotive in assembling the train; Thomas Dolan, standing just a few yards away, was violently thrown in the air by the force of the blast, landing dead on the ground. 

 Other railway employees such as George Hawkins, car repairers Alfred Lamb and Joseph Humphry, freight clerks Andrew Porter and James Drysdale, Valentine Flynn, car foreman William Simcock and call boy James Miller were left with varying degrees of injuries but still alive.  Hawkins received the worst of it, his head being pierced by an approximate six-inch-long splinter which destroyed the sight in both his eyes; Lamb and Humphry were assaulted by a swarm of splinters as they made their way across the yard; Porter and Drysdale were bruised as the blast hit the freight office, the latter even being thrown over a desk;