What did July 4th look like before fireworks?

the idea of fireworks for the 4th of July. Um, you know, it used to be a lot of cannon fire, a lot of, you know, bombs going off, but that became too too difficult. Then we had a tradition in the United States of building pyramids.Towns, particularly New England, would take old whiskey barrels or flower barrels and pile them up high to see how big a pyramid they could have for for July 4th. Fireworks in Pyroch Nick started improving and were easy to do. And now it's really tied to the hip of the 4th of July ...