The Aetna Powder/Explosives Company 1880-1919

On April 3, 1880, three men from Chicago incorporated the Aetna Powder Company in Indiana to make high explosive powder, the newly invented dynamite. James Parker and Horace Pratt, coal salesmen, and Michael Tierney, a politician had little idea of how to build or run a dynamite factory. Their initial attempts to build on a spot near Schererville came to naught and Parker wisely turned to his old friend Addison O. Fay, president and owner of the Miami Powder Company in Xenia, Ohio. Fay was an old hand at the business of making powder, having owned mills in Massachusetts with his father, and having bought out Joseph King’s Miami Powder Company in 1877, enlarging it and operating it with electricity, the first mill in the country to do so. Dynamite was used not only in mining, quarry blasting, but also in tree stump removal as American farmers continued to clear land.

Fay got right to work in Aetna; fourteen months after Fay began building the plant in Aetna, Weston Goodspeed, wrote in Counties of Porter and Lake, Indiana (1882) that

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