Engineers working on the Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts, United States, adopted Alfred Nobel's newly invented dynamite and tri-nitroglycerin to replace slow hand drilling and black powder. The project, which cut a 4.75-mile rail tunnel through Hoosac Mountain, had earned the nickname 'The Bloody Pit' due to the high mortality rate of workers. The introduction of standardized dynamite accelerated excavation and became a proof-of-concept for American heavy civil engineering.

The brutal, explosive labor at the Hoosac Tunnel inspired local folk ballads and industrial poems that memorialized the immigrant laborers who died in the mountain's depths. This event reinforced a genre of American labor poetry that contrasted technological triumph with human sacrifice.