MASURY, Ohio – An industrial pocket in the southeastern corner of Brookfield Township that is today home to notable manufacturers such as Bull Moose Tube, Roemer Industries and other companies has a past steeped in innovation, risk, tragedy and Gilded Age New York.
Masury, an enclave of approximately 2,000 residents, derives its name from Frederick L.M. and Olive Masury, the founders of the Masurite Explosive Co., which established a manufacturing complex off what is today Standard Avenue in 1903.
“The plant was a collection of buildings to make explosives,” says Larry Bodnovich, a lifelong resident of the Masury area. “From what I understand, there may have been 40-some buildings there.” The location of the plant was near a brickyard and the Sharon, Pa., streetcar line. Aside from these early interests, this section of the township lacked any industrial presence until Masury selected the site for his new factory. Once the company was established, the small community of Masury was born, as the company began constructing houses nearby for its workers.
Innovation, Development
Central to the company’s business was Masurite – a flameless chemical explosive invented by Masury that was described in a 1902 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine as “more powerful than dynamite” but much more stable and safer to handle. The material was specifically marketed to the mining industry for blasting purposes.
Masury was born in New York in 1874, the grandson of pioneering paint manufacturer John W. Masury, who developed a process in which paint colors could be mass-produced. The elder Masury followed with other novel patents that included new mills for paint grinding and the first paint can in which a metal top could be easily removed. The inventions laid the foundation for a family fortune, and a sprawling 100-acre estate at Center Moriches on Long Island. The estate’s grand ballroom still stands today.
Frederick Masury, then a 23-year-old who recently graduated Columbia University with a chemistry degree, inherited a sizeable amount of money – $2 million – after a contested battle over his grandfather’s will, according to an account in the Salem (Massachusetts) Gazette in 1897. A year earlier, the young Masury made headlines throughout the country when he married Olive Lake, a New York socialite who had recently obtained a divorce from “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, the former heavyweight boxing champion. The marriage would prove instrumental in bringing the Masurite Explosive Co. to Trumbull County.
According to Brookfield Historical Society member Barbara Stevens, Olive had some familial ties to Brookfield Township and on occasions made trips to the area to visit relatives. “She had visited here before and knew about the coal mining activity,” she says. Fred Masury, at the time a chemist employed at the DuPont Corp., by then had perfected concussion tests demonstrating that his new explosive compound was far less volatile than nitroglycerine or dynamite. “For this reason, it is claimed that the Masurite can be used with perfect safety in the most gaseous coal mines,” concluded the Engineering and Mining Journal in March 1902.
By that time, Masury had already made the decision to build his new complex in Brookfield and was nearing completion of the plant. Although the company was still headquartered in New York, Fred and Olive Masury opted to build a stately house just north of the factory. Eventually, the offices would be moved to Sharon, Pa., and then to Masury.
At the same time, the company invested in the construction of new homes in the small hamlet to house its workers, Bodnovich says. “A lot of those houses were built in the early 1900s,” he says, especially along Standard Avenue and Elm Street, near the industrial corridor. The company constructed approximately 16 homes in the area, according to the historical society.
Disaster Strikes
It’s unclear as to precisely how many workers the Masurite Explosive Co. employed, though published reports estimate approximately 50, many of which were young women.
Operations during the first three years of the company appeared to run without incident. That changed on the morning of June 5, 1906, when an explosion rocked the company’s cap room, killing 16-year-old Lucy Ryser. The blast also severely injured John Finn of Hubbard, age 18, who suffered the loss of one eye and “frightful cuts and bruises about the head and body,” according to an account in the Youngstown Vindicator.
The company paid for the funeral services for the young victim, which The Vindicator described as “solemn and beautiful.” A year later, attorneys representing the Ryser family filed a lawsuit against the Electric Device Co. and the Masurite Explosive Co. According to a Vindicator account, Ryser “upon the assurance of Fred Masury that the work was not dangerous, entered the employ of the Masurite Explosive Co.” However, the suit claimed that her job at the time required cementing wire into detonating caps, in reality a very dangerous job, according to the newspaper account.
“She was 16 years of age at the time of her death and earning 85 cents a day,” the account said. The plaintiffs sued for $10,000.
Finn’s attorneys also filed a lawsuit against the company, seeking damages of $25,000, reports show. Another suit, filed by employee Susie Coril, claimed that a faulty blasting cap detonated in a separate incident, resulting in her losing an eye. Her attorneys also requested damages of $25,000.
There is no record as to the outcome of the lawsuits.
The company was also subject to labor disputes that on at least two occasions resulted in strikes among women workers, according to newspaper accounts.
In September 1909, female employees walked off the job after management refused to advance their wages before their regular payday, which had fallen that year on Labor Day. “Since the strike, colored women have been doing the work,” according to a newspaper account. A settlement was eventually reached.
Another dispute several months later involving what workers deemed the unfair termination of two women employees resulted in a strike at the company, according to a report in The Vindicator dated Jan. 12, 1910. “All of the girl employees at the Masurite Explosive Company’s Works are again out on strike and they have succeeded in closing that portion of the plant,” the account read.
Workers returned to their jobs several days later, the newspaper reported. “Twenty of the 23 girls who struck returned to work on Monday,” the report said. Three refused to return, noting that they had been promised a raise of 10 cents per day, only to be told later wages would remain unchanged.
The proliferation of Masurite on at least one occasion caused alarm in nearby Youngstown, according to other reports.
On Nov. 11, 1907, police discovered a cache of 35 sticks of Masurite “concealed in the house of a foreigner north of town,” the Vindicator reported. However, the explosives did not have the special detonator cap, rendering them useless. “If the Masurite had been properly exploded, there was enough of it in the house to destroy half the city,” the newspaper account noted with a flourish of exaggeration.
Business Booms
Nevertheless, business at the company thrived as Masurite early on earned approval by the U.S. government for use in the mining industry. In 1908, the company also won a case against the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad before the Interstate Commerce Commission that stood to reduce shipping costs. The ICC held that “Masurite, which is a high explosive but not dangerous to handle, should be accorded a lower rate than dynamite.”
Meanwhile, Fred Masury and his wife, Olive, became active in civic affairs and local politics. At one point, Masury was appointed as a deputy sheriff to help locate the kidnapped nephew of Sharon industrialist Frank Buhl. The boy was found in Cleveland after a ransom was paid, and his captors were eventually arrested and convicted.
The Masurys also became alarmed when their son went missing in 1907. News accounts from across the region followed the story of missing 18-year-old George Masury, who at the time was being tutored in Youngstown. “The mysterious disappearance of George Masury, the son of the president of the Masurite Explosive Co., has greatly worried his family, and it is believed that he has been kidnapped,” according to a Vindicator article dated March 27, 1907. After a week, authorities ruled out kidnapping, but the family feared the worst and that he might be dead.
Then, more than a year later, Masury received word that George had joined the U.S. Army and was serving in the Philippines, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Gazette dated May 27, 1908. According to records, George Tait Masury would earn the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism for his actions during the American Expeditionary Force’s Siberian intervention in the Russian Civil War in November of 1919. Records show that the younger Masury saved the lives of noncombatant women during a heavy crossfire between anti-Bolshevik, or “White Army,” forces and the Bolshevik Red Army. George Masury died in 1975 in Santa Cruz, Calif.
Meanwhile, Fred Masury had established himself as a prominent Mahoning Valley industrialist and his company flourished. But the mining industry in Trumbull County by 1910 had run dry. This might have been a factor in Masury’s decision to liquidate the company the following year.
Brookfield Historical Society’s Stevens says that another theory is that one of the key employees at the plant who was privy to Masurite’s trade secrets absconded with the formula and took a major position with DuPont.
Nevertheless, the announcement in 1911 that the company had abruptly closed without any warning shocked the community. On June 2, 1911, a Vindicator report relayed that “business circles were stirred by the announcement,” noting that the permanent closure of the facility would cost approximately 50 jobs.
However, the Masury works laid the foundation for future industrial expansion in this part of Brookfield, Bodnovich says. “He sold the plant and land to the Standard Tank Car Co.,” which expanded its business there and constructed approximately 100 houses for its workers.
The company manufactured railroad tank cars and was later acquired by General American Tank Car, or today GATX. That company shut down its Masury location in 1984. However, a cluster of other industrial and manufacturing had already settled into this sector, now known as Masury.
After the plant shut down, Fred and Olive Masury left for New York and eventually moved to California, where Masury served as an explosives consultant for the U.S. Army. He then turned his interests to real estate.
Fred Masury died in 1950 in Santa Barbara, with his family name forever enshrined in this small corner of Brookfield Township.
Pictured at top: This bell rang for shift changes at the Masurite Explosive Company (1904-1911).