Charles Lindberg’s was not the only feat of aeronautics to come out of the St Louis area in 1927. Much less remembered but no less daring, were the efforts of an Army officer, Captain Hawthorn C Gray, to rise higher than any had before.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.