The Three Tumblers Podcast

The Remains of the Lake View School

The Investigation Begins

The very afternoon of the fire, investigations began. Fire Marshal Brockman interviewed the burned and bandaged Fritz Hirter on the grounds of the school. Fritz lost his eight-year-old Ida, and ten-year-old Walter, and had witnessed his thirteen-year-old daughter Helena burn to death inside the school. While there was some initial speculation that Hirter was somehow responsible for the blaze, this was quickly disputed and he was later hailed as a hero.

Official reports of the investigation have been lost to history, however according to news reports of the time and the book, “Complete Story of the Collinwood School Disaster, and How Such Horrors Can be Prevented” by Marshall Everett, 1908; no official cause was ever determined.

There was electrical wiring in the building, but that was ruled out. Also, the steam pipes leading from the boilers up through the school were reportedly wrapped in asbestos to insulate the wooden components of the structure from the intense heat. However, there were many identifiable factors to the large loss of life that were immediately apparent.

We have already mentioned and discussed the choke-points at the bottom of the stairs. Having any kind of narrowing at a point of egress not only causes a delay in getting out, but it almost certainly guarantees an outcome as we have discussed in this series. Those who are trying to escape can and will trip and fall; and those behind them don’t realize it until it’s too late and they fall on top of them.

That decision to build the partitions proved to be fatal. Continue reading →

Firefighters work to extinguish the fire at the Lake View school.

Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

A Village Reacts

In the streets near the school there were shouts and screams as the smell of smoke drifted through the air. People literally dropped what they were doing as others rushed by yelling at them that the school was burning. Twenty-four-year-old John Leffel is near the school and when he sees the smoke, he begins running as fast as he can to try and help save the children that were still trapped. The closer he gets to the building; the heat and smoke are so intense his eyes burn and it’s hard to breathe but he keeps running to the buildings rear entrance, hoping that it’s not too late.

“I ran to the school when I saw the smoke. The rear entrance, where the storm doors blocked up the arch, was heaped up with little bodies. I seized the first children I could reach and dragged them out. Some of the children seemed half suffocated. Some were unconscious. I did not stop to look. I seized them by the arms or legs or bodies and tossed them out behind.”

Andrew Dorn and Wallace Upton both live and work in the neighborhood and also run to the school. They each have children trapped inside and run to the back door as well. By the time the men are able to break free a stuck door, children are in a pile at the bottleneck of the bottom of the stairs. They are already starting to burn. Andrew finds his daughter, nine-year-old Gretchen, and tries desperately to pull her from the crush of children, dislocating both of her arms in the process but still cannot free her. He is finally forced to let go as he himself is starting to burn. Wallace manages to rescue eighteen children by pulling them from the heap, despite having second- and third-degree burns covering his arms. Only later does he learn that his own child was among the ones he managed to save. Continue reading →

Lake View School on fire.

Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

The School Day Starts

Twenty-six-year-old Grace Fiske had entered the school well before her third grade students began arriving. Grace was born in New York, but later moved with her parents to Collinwood. Her father was a trimmer on a steam ship, and her mother was a housewife. Having become a teacher at age twenty-six is still not uncommon even today, nor is being unmarried and living with your parents. The house at 10522 Orville Avenue was only a few blocks away from the school so the daily walk was easy.

As her students began arriving a little after eight o’clock, there were the usual greetings and grumblings from students as they put away their coats and got their books, papers, and pencils ready. With forty-nine students, the room was completely packed. Over-crowding was a serious issue at Lake View. As we discussed in part one, the significant increase in population in such a short time led to issues throughout the village. Every classroom in the entire building was packed full. Even the third floor gymnasium that had been converted into classrooms was full of students. On that day in March, three-hundred-fifty students packed into a building that had been designed for only about two hundred. This forced teachers and staff to crowd the desks together and cram the kids in tight. Children were typically less than an arms length away from another classmate. This over-crowding also forced architects to build in additional wardrobe spaces in the school during the 1906 expansion. As a result, wardrobe rooms were constructed around the stairways as well. Continue reading →

Lake View School.

Author’s Note: The events we will be discussing occurred one-hundred-fifteen years ago. Many of the details have been lost to history. All attempts at accuracy have been made however, official records are often incomplete and media reports of the day are somewhat unreliable. A list of our source material will be provided at the end of this article.

A Growing Village

In the mid to late eighteen hundreds, Collinwood, Ohio was a mostly agricultural community. Located just outside of Cleveland, there were lots of wide-open spaces, fresh air, and a small community of locals. In 1877 however, The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway began a massive expansion along its Lake Erie line. Cornelius Vanderbilt and The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad purchased a majority of stock in the line in order to provide an ideal line between New York and Chicago.

A New York Central Line train in Collinwood, OH.By 1898, the railway had constructed a yard in Collinwood that literally split the town in half. Local real estate companies planned to use large swaths of land for residential construction. Anticipating future growth, these investors planned lots for residential housing and commercial buildings alike. In addition to the railroad maintenance shops, there were other industries like Browning Engineering, Peerless Manufacturing, and the Lind Paint Company, all building facilities along the tracks.

Property developers had built scores of single-family homes in anticipation of the coming population boom. Most of these houses were twenty by thirty-foot, two-story structures. Families moving to the area typically had between two and five children. Although living in a cramped, twelve-hundred square foot home could be tough at times, they made it work on the hopes that the money coming in would lead to bigger, better things. However, there were certainly some drawbacks of the time. Rockefeller Creek, which ran through most of the village, was the primary outlet for sewage of the residents. In 1909, an inspector from the Board of Health described the creek as a “practically open sewer”. More than two-hundred-thousand gallons of thick, raw sewage from the town oozed into the creek every single day. Continue reading →