While there can be a legitimate question over whether the fastest time that a person has ever run the hundred meter hurdles while wearing swimming fins (14.82 seconds) really deserves to be remembered, certainly a few record attempts at least fall into the category of history stranger than fiction.
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.