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Archiver > MIHOUGHT > 2001-02 > 0981920805


From: RT Couture <>
Subject: Re: [MIHOUGHT-L] Italian Hall Fire 1913
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 11:46:45 -0800 (PST)
In-Reply-To: <200102111755.f1BHtxc27898@cgi.rootsweb.com>



Thanks Michele for posting this account of the fire. I sure hope that none of my ancestors were victims. Unfortunately, things have changed since 1913 as far as fire evacuations.

Michele <> wrote:
Posted on: Houghton Co. Mi Query Forum
Reply Here: http://genconnect.rootsweb.com/gc/USA/Mi/Houghton/1020

Surname: Moyer, Saari
-------------------------

Calumet, Houghton County, Michigan, 1913
Source: The L'Anse Sentinel, Saturday, December 27, 1913

CALUMET DISASTER MOST SHOCKING IN THE STATE. Lives of Seventy-One Persons
Sacrificed When Panic is Started Through False Alarm of Fire.
NOT A VESTIGE OF FLAME, EVEN FROM CANDLE
Italian Hall, Calumet, the Scene of Christmas Entertainment, is Converted
Into a Charnel House.
--L'Anse Extends Sympathy.

Seventy-one persons, children, women and men, were crushed and smothered
to death Wednesday afternoon in the Italian hall, Red Jacket, Calumet,
as the result of a panic precipitated by a cry of "Fire." Never before
was a disaster attended with such shocking loss of life enacted in Michigan.

The tragedy has plunged into gloom a copper country harried and stricken
for the past five months by a strike that brought with it death and destruction.
This crowning act of calamity cost the lives of thirty-four girls, and
twenty boys, the majority of whom were young children; twelve women and
five men.

The disaster occurred during a Christmas tree celebration given by Woman's
auxilliary to the Western Federation of Miners to the children of the strikers.
It took place while pitiful presents were being distributed to mere babies,
already suffering from the horrors of an industrial conflict that has riven
a once contented region. The hall was crowded principally with women and
children, the men being few comparatively.

Charles H. Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, came out
with a statement that the man who gave the false and fatal alarm had climbed
the stairs and stood in the hallway when he uttered the cry, that he wore
a Citizens' Alliance button and that many witnesses would testify to this.
Matti Saari, a member of the Western Federation of Miners, says that this
is not so, that no man came up the stair. He stood at the head of the stairs
and says positively that the alarm came from within the hall.

The Italian hall is a large room of the familiar type of assembly room
for lodges and societies of various sorts. It is reached by a narrow stairway
from the street and this stairway ends at a small landing, with double
doors opening into the landing. When the panic started the awful tide of
seven hundred people flowed down till there was a causeway of quivering
bodies over which many managed to escape by trampling and crawling and
falling down into the street, heedless of everything except safety. It
was impossible to release the jam from below and the work of clearing the
fatal incline had to be done from above.




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