No, really.
I'm sitting here reading about the Bath School disaster:
and I discover that the building was rigged with a bunch of dynamite and something called "pyrotol." I'd never heard of the latter, so I Wikipedia rabbit holed that too:
Apparently, the US had so much of this stuff left over from World War I that, for a time, DuPont was literally giving it away. Anyone could write to them and receive as much pyrotol as they wanted. All they had to do was pay for packaging and shipping - the explosive itself was free.
Granted, your neighbors would notice if you came home with a Model T full of pyrotol every single day. There was probably some fed somewhere who might get a call from DuPont if you went too nuts. (Maybe? The FBI existed, but the ATF wasn't founded until 1972.) But if you bought what your fellow farmers thought was a "normal" amount at "normal" intervals? Nah.
And "normal" seems to have been a lot of pyrotol. In the transcript from the Bath School disaster's coroner's inquest, nobody thought anything of people coming home with 500 pounds of this stuff at a time. Or if they did think of it, their response was "I wonder if he'll let me buy some of that off him so I can blow up this stump in my backyard." Not "only a maniac needs that much pyrotol."
In fact, dynamite got so popular among farmers that "dynamite farmer" was actually a thing for a while. It referred to farmers who did things like remove stumps and boulders with dynamite. Some even went so far as to attempt harvesting crops like potatoes by blowing them up:
Ohio History: Farming With Dynamite
Check out this article in the 1912 Charlevoix (MI) County Herald (top left):
Dynamite largely increases yield of different crops
It wasn't all fun and games, though. One Ohio farmer lost three cows when they ate ten sticks of dynamite among them:
Cincinnati Labor Advocate: Cows Eat Dynamite
(The cows did not explode, making the necropsy a somewhat touchy affair, as the dynamite was still inside them.)
The 1920s were a different world. People called cars "machines" and measured distances in "rods." Lead was a condiment. Having basic electrical wiring skills or understanding how to build a radio made you the l33t h4xx0r of your day. If you wanted a thousand pounds of explosive, you could have it, and what you did with it was your business. And/or you could die of tuberculosis.
We're probably better off as a society with fewer unregulated explosives and more antibiotics. Cars with seatbelts and airbags are nice. But wow. Just...."dear DuPont, send me half a ton of splodey." Imagine.
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