A quiet Friday morning at Brooksville’s May-Stringer House turned into a scene straight out of a crime show when staffers cracked open a donation box and found a century-old glass medicine bottle that had crystallized into a volatile compound.
The historic home-turned-museum was quickly cordoned off as emergency crews stepped in, treating the fragile relic less like a quaint medical oddity and more like a potential explosive. Volunteers and nearby businesses were kept at a distance while a bomb squad mapped out how to get the bottle out safely.
According to FOX 13 Tampa Bay, Hernando County Fire Rescue got the first call at about 8:05 a.m., with sheriff's deputies looped in around 8:40 a.m. The glass bottle, believed to date back to the late 1800s or early 1900s, was labeled picric acid and had been tucked inside a donations box at the museum. The report notes that the Citrus County bomb squad was called in and headed to Brooksville to neutralize the item.
Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis told FOX 13 Tampa Bay that the contents of the bottle had crystallized, making them sensitive to shock and essentially turning the material into something that “becomes an explosive” once dry. Deputies said they tracked the donation to a woman who explained that the bottle had belonged to her father, a physician who kept it in his office before he died about four years ago. Authorities treated the whole episode as a non-criminal incident while specialists worked out how to deal with the risk.
Why Crystallized Picric Acid Is Hazardous
Picric acid (2,4,6-trinitrophenol) once had a place in medicine and in dyes, but safety officials stress that when it dries out and forms crystals, it becomes highly sensitive to heat, shock and friction. The University of Minnesota's safety fact sheet explains that dry picric acid and some picrate salts are powerful explosives, and that crystals can develop in the threads of a bottle, making even twisting the cap a risky move. The guidance recommends limiting access to old containers and calling in trained hazardous-materials or bomb technicians instead of trying to move or open them yourself. University of Minnesota HSRM
Museum Collections Can Hide Dangerous Items
For museums that accept medical artifacts and apothecary collections, surprises like this are not unheard of. Curators sometimes inherit everything from arsenic and mercury to reactive chemicals and old explosives. Academic research into historic pharmaceutical collections has documented how institutions must carefully inventory and research these holdings, then often pay for professional disposal of anything dangerous, a process that can stretch both time and budgets for small local museums. The discovery at the May-Stringer House highlights how routine these so-called “legacy hazards” can be, even when they arrive in an ordinary donation box. Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals
What Museums and the Public Should Know
The May-Stringer House, operated by the Hernando Historical Museum Association, features period medical displays among its exhibits, which makes donations of old medical items unsurprising, if occasionally nerve-racking. Safety experts advise that donors and museum staff treat any unknown or unlabeled bottles as potentially hazardous: avoid handling or opening them, keep others away from the area and call emergency responders or qualified hazardous-materials technicians to take over.
For more background on the risks and suggested precautions around picric acid and similar chemicals, the University of Minnesota HSRM fact sheet and the Hernando Historical Museum Association provide additional guidance.
Officials said the area surrounding the historic home would stay closed off until specialists finished neutralizing the bottle and declared the property safe. The museum plans to update its hours and visitor information once authorities complete the disposal and the site is reopened.
