the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks (1906)

The explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks on Easter Sunday 1906 was the deadliest single event in Derry’s history, killing 102 people—88 of them children—and ending the town’s twenty-seven-year cycle of violence for that period. The disaster occurred during a community Easter-egg hunt inside the Ironworks building, when the entire structure exploded without warning. The cause was never determined, and the event was followed by a period of relative calm in Derry, fitting the pattern of a massive sacrifice that quiets the malevolent force known as It.

The Easter-egg Hunt and the Explosion

On Easter Sunday 1906, the owners of the Kitchener Ironworks held an Easter-egg hunt for “all the good children of Derry.” Five hundred chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in gay ribbons were hidden about the works, and at least one child was present for each egg. Dangerous areas were closed off, and employees volunteered to stand guard. Three generations of the Kitchener family were there to watch and to award prizes at the end of the hunt, scheduled for four o’clock. The end came forty-five minutes early, at quarter past three, when the Ironworks exploded. Seventy-two people were pulled dead from the wreckage before sundown; the final toll was a hundred and two, eighty-eight of them children. On the following Wednesday, a woman found the head of nine-year-old Robert Dohay caught in the limbs of her back-yard apple tree. There was chocolate on the Dohay lad’s teeth and blood in his hair. He was the last of the known dead. Eight children and one adult were never accounted for.

The Unexplained Cause

The explosion was never explained. All four of the Ironworks’ boilers were shut down—not just banked, but shut down. The disaster was the worst tragedy in Derry’s history, even worse than the fire at the Black Spot in 1930. Mike Hanlon, researching Derry’s history, noted that the explosion ended the cycle of murder and disappearance which happened in the years 1929-30, just as the fire at the Black Spot ended a cycle some twenty-five years before. He came to believe that a monstrous sacrifice is needed at the end of each cycle to quiet whatever terrible force works in Derry, sending It to sleep for another quarter-century or so.

The Aftermath and the Ruins

The Kitchener Ironworks was never rebuilt. By the late 1950s, the site was a field of tumbled masonry and rusting machinery, where the great chimney—faced with tile, caked black with soot for the final ten feet—lay in the high grass like a gigantic pipe. Children from the Losers’ Club sometimes explored the ruins, scrambling up the fallen smokestack and walking along it with their arms held out like tightwire walkers. The field was full of relics: bricks, dippers, chunks of iron with rusty bolts, panes of glass, bottles full of unnamable gunk. The cellarhold of the Ironworks remained a gaping hole, and it was here that Mike Hanlon, at age eleven, encountered a giant bird—a manifestation of It—that chased him into the fallen smokestack. The bird’s tongue was silver, its surface crazy-cracked, and on it were a number of orange puffs, the same color as the pompoms on Pennywise the Clown’s suit. By 1985, the field was gone, replaced by the Derry Mall, a collection of ugly buildings with signs for Sears, J. C. Penney, Woolworth’s, and dozens of other stores. The mall itself was destroyed in the storm of May 31st, 1985, when a series of explosions tore through it, scattering diamond rings, ice-cream soup, and banknotes across the flooded parking lot.

Narrative Significance

The Kitchener Ironworks explosion serves as a key historical marker in Derry’s cycle of violence. It is one of the major events that Mike Hanlon uncovers in his research, demonstrating that the town’s horrors are not isolated incidents but part of a recurring pattern. The ruins of the Ironworks also become a site of personal encounter with It for Mike Hanlon, where the creature manifests as a giant bird—a form that connects to his earliest childhood fear. The eventual replacement of the ruins by a shopping mall, and the mall’s subsequent destruction, mirrors the larger pattern of Derry’s decay and the cyclical nature of the evil that haunts the town.