The atomic bomb that faded into South Carolina history

Bo Petersen in The Post and Courier:

Ella Davis Hudson remembers stacking bricks to make a kitchen to play house. The next thing she knew, the 9 year old was running down the driveway, blood streaming from the gash above her eye.

She doesn’t remember the actual blast from an atomic bomb.

Sixty years ago, on March 11, 1958, an Air Force bomber dropped a nuclear weapon on a farm in the rural Mars Bluff community outside Florence. The radioactive payload either wasn’t loaded in the warhead or didn’t detonate — the stories differ.

But the TNT trigger for the bomb blew a crater in Walter Gregg’s garden some 24 feet deep and 50 feet wide. The blast shredded his farm house about 100 yards away. Hudson, a cousin, had been playing with two of Gregg’s children in the backyard.

More here.