A tiny East Texas museum makes sure the history of the London School explosion is not forgotten

The London Museum & Cafe is sort of in the middle of nowhere on Main Street in New London, Texas, a town of just under 1,000 people about half an hour east of Tyler. The location is a challenge that volunteers at the museum are well aware of, but they say visitors who make the trek are often surprised by what they find.

“I think they don’t know what to expect. And they walk back there and they’re kind of pleasantly surprised, you know. So we do hear, ‘it’s so well done.’ We hear that quite a bit,” said archivist Becky Tyner, who’s volunteered at the museum since 1997 — even before it officially opened.

The London Museum & Cafe sits to the west of the town’s four-lane Main Street. To the east is West Rusk High School, which had been known as London High School until 1965.

In a grassy opening where the road splits, marked by a brown historical marker sign, is the London School Explosion Memorial. It’s a 32-foot cenotaph made of Texas pink granite to remember the lives lost on March 18, 1937 – the day the London School exploded.

If you Google the explosion, the first thing that will probably come up is a Wikipedia page for the “New London School Explosion,” but Jimmie Piercy, a volunteer docent at the museum, explained that’s a bit of a misnomer.

New London was settled before the Civil War as London, Texas, but the population declined and it eventually lost its post office. When the town tried to get it back in 1931, there was another London, Texas, and so they became New London instead.

“If you look across the street at the school, across the auditorium, it says London High School Auditorium,” Piercy said. “So people call it New London School. It wasn’t; it was London School.”

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‘Two fatal flaws’

In 1930, oil was discovered in the area, and people moved to London from all over.

Miles Toler, the museum’s former director and a longtime volunteer, said when he was growing up, it seemed like everyone worked for an oil company. A common question was “What oil company does your daddy work for?”

By 1932, this tiny town was home to the wealthiest rural district in the world due to the oil industry. They opened a $300,000 school building for middle and high school students that had a workshop, a chemistry lab and even the first lighted football field in the state.

Almost everything was top-of-the-line – but the school had two fatal flaws, Piercy said.

The first was that the school was not built on a slab as originally planned. Instead, it was built on a hill and placed on concrete steel reinforced piers and beams, which left a huge crawl space underneath it.

The second was how the school was heated. The district decided to use natural gas, running the line in that crawl space and attaching it to 72 radiators throughout the school.

“So you’ve now got 72 connections to one gas line in a crawl space that’s neither lighted nor vented very well,” Piercy said.

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Five years after construction, the school board made one final bad decision. In early 1937, they canceled their natural gas contract and tapped into a residual gas line that ran by the school for free — a surprisingly common practice in the area.

The decision was made to save money, not that the school was struggling. The district’s taxable value was $20 million, which would be over $400 million today, and they had additional income from 15 oil rigs on the property. Nevertheless, the board voted 4-3 to make the switch.

“This wasn’t a matter of if this building was going to blow up, but when this building was going to blow up,” Piercy said.

‘I didn’t hear it, but I felt it’

A few months after the switch, students began complaining of headaches and burning eyes. And at the time, natural gas did not yet have an added smell, so no one knew what was wrong.

Around 3:15 p.m. on March 18, 1937, the younger students had already been dismissed and 350 high school students were out of school for a practice county meet. The rest of the older kids, about 500, were in class as usual.

Students in the school’s workshop were trying to clean up for a long weekend. As they opened a door to the crawl space to put away extra wood and supplies, gas began leaking into the shop.

Then their instructor plugged in a belt sander. Sparks flew, and all that gas that had been accumulating in the crawl space ignited.

“The only fire in this whole explosion was right there in the shop,” Piercy said. “That little crawl space door became the mouth of hell, and the fire shot out.”

It took just two beats for all of the gas in the crawl space under the school to ignite.

“When it ignited, it sent that eight-inch steel concrete floor up through the classrooms, through the ceiling, through the roof, two to three hundred feet high, and then it just smashed back down on everything,” Piercy said.

The London School exploded.

“I talked to a lady several years ago, Miss Davis that lives in Oklahoma, and she’d been a little kid at that time with her mother in the gym,” Piercy said. “I asked her, ‘Miss Davis, did you hear the explosion?’ She said, ‘No ma’am, I didn’t hear it, but I felt it, and I looked out the window, and I saw little children floating through the air, and their arms, and their legs, and their heads.”

The school’s custodian ran to the superintendent’s house, which had one of the five phones in New London to call the switchboard, which now sits in the London Museum.

“He calls that switchboard and says, ‘send help. The London School just blew up.’ Now ask yourself, in 1937, who in the heck do you call?” Piercy said. “No fire departments, no EMS, no rescue squads. So you call the sheriff, get a hold of the governor and you start calling the oil companies. And the oil companies started coming, and they came and they came.”

But the first help to arrive were 50 mothers in a PTA meeting at the gym. They usually met in the school itself but had moved last-minute – and they became the first responders.

The need for triage space was overwhelming. Nearby Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler was supposed to open the next day with a grand ceremony. They canceled it and opened immediately.

As the nearby hospitals filled up, so did the morgues.

“The kids that they took out of the building immediately that were dead, they just started stacking them like cordwood on the south side of the building until they could get enough hearse or pickup trucks or whatever to take them to morgues,” Piercy said. “The local morgues filled up very quickly, so they made morgues in skating rinks, in church basements, in VFW halls, all over East Texas.”

After the explosion, civilian cars and trucks were used to transport the wounded and dead. Peach baskets, seen on the ground in the foreground, were used to store anything found in the rubble, whether it was a body part or a belonging.
Courtesy of the London Museum & Cafe

As people were sifting through the rubble of the school, they saved what they found – like little shoes, purses and books – in peach baskets that a truck driver donated shortly after the explosion.

The London Museum is filled with items found in the rubble that day, some of which, like a pocket knife, were used to identify victims.

“This little boy here, Perry Lee Cox,” Piercy said, gesturing to a boy’s photo, “he and his sister Bobby Kate were going to play hooky that day and Daddy caught him, gave him a spanking and sent him back to school. Bobby Kate missed the explosion, but Perry Lee was killed, and the only way Daddy could identify him was the knife in his pocket.”

‘They could not talk about it’

The explosion was immediately a national news story, as heard in a newsreel at the museum that aired the next day:

“Ghastly ruins of Texas school has risen the most appalling disaster of its kind in American history. By flare and searchlight, 1,500 volunteers desperately searched where already over 400 victims, students and teachers have been counted. Daylight reveals the catastrophe in all its terrifying details. Hardly a family in the little town of New London has escaped the blow of this heartbreaking calamity.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sent their condolences. Adolph Hitler also sent a telegram, which is now at the museum, expressing his sympathy.

Men sift through the rubble of the explosion looking for victims and any belongings.
Courtesy of the London Museum & Cafe

It was Walter Cronkite’s first big news story, and he never forgot it.

“It was the first disaster of any kind like that I’d seen, and is still to this day the biggest natural disaster of that sort I’ve ever covered,” Cronkite said in an archive tape that’s at the museum.

The London School explosion is the reason that natural gas is scented, that engineers and architects must be licensed, and that schools can’t use gas heat and must be built on a slab, all due to legislation that Texas passed quickly following the tragedy.

“Because of that explosion, millions and millions of lives have been saved,” Piercy said.

So why, now, do so few people know about it?

Piercy said it’s most likely because after the explosion, New London just didn’t talk about it.

“Anybody who had been there would not talk about it. They could not talk about it,” Piercy said. “I asked granddad one time to tell me about it, and he said, ‘You know, I was in World War I in the trenches in France, and I never saw anything that bad. Don’t ask me.’”

The town held a memorial on Easter Sunday – a few days after the explosion – for the at least 294 students and teachers killed. The next memorial would not be held for 40 years.

Tyner, the museum archivist, graduated from London High School in 1961, but she didn’t know about the explosion until a college chemistry class, when she saw a note that it was the reason gas smelled.

“We would walk past that cenotaph and we never asked. I guess we knew we weren’t supposed to ask or talk about it or something,” she said. “It’s kind of weird that we would just not know, but my, that was very eye-opening when I did find out, mercy me.”

The soda fountain at the London Museum & Cafe has been in continuous operation since 1938.
Aislyn Gaddis / Texas Standard

In 1992, Mollie Ward, who was a fourth-grader at the time of the explosion, got a board of directors together to form a museum. The London Museum & Cafe opened in an old drugstore in 1998, 61 years after the explosion.

Aside from a paid cook and secretary, the museum – which still keeps the soda fountain running – is entirely run by volunteers.

If you visit the museum’s website, the first thing you’ll see is a quote “No one is dead, truly dead, until no one remembers them and no one speaks their name.”

The tiny London Museum & Cafe is making sure that never happens — that this history is not forgotten.

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