Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1885 — A FEARFUL ACCIDENT. [ARTICLE]

A FEARFUL ACCIDENT.

Ten Girls * n a BuriwgStruCTßre at v Five or Lost, Three Using Dished to Pieces on the » Pavement. -r- —‘. 1 One Mother Finds Three of Her Daughters Laid Out in the Morgue. Cincinnati was, the other day, the scene of a shocking fire disaster, by which sixteen or seventeen human lives were sacrificed. Eighteen girls/mostly the support or help of their families, lunched merrily at noon in the large front room on the fifth floor of the Sullivan printing works, No. 19 Two hours later mod of themgrere flLd. Ten of them were suffocatecHby the fhnpke, their bodies shriveled and scorched®) y the heat of a fire that cut o& J wiih scarcely a warning. It would be hard to construct a more perfect death-trap. It was on the top floor, with three w.ndows in front and one in the rear, where an ell of the building gave room. It was entered from a narrow stairway in the tear, which wound around the elevator, well fenced-in with wooden lattice-work. The second floor held the heavy presses. A boy brought up a gallon can filled with benzine to clean the type forms, Nobody knows the cause, but something caused ihe benzine to explode near the press next the elevator wall. The burning fluid spread to the ink-well of the press and to a drying-rack filled with freshly printed sheets next the elevator. Sullivan, the proprietor, saw it. He caught a lot of heavy brown sheets of paper to smother it out. In an instant all the room saw it was uselesk “My God," said Sullivnn, “tell the —girls up-stairs.” His brother flew up the stairs to the tindery. The flames were there as quickly as he, climbing up the lattice-work of the elevator like a flash. The girls were terrified out of their senses. The flames cut off their’only means of escape. They rushed .to the front windows. The flames reached forward and caught at them.' Fiveof them leaped from the windows and were crushed to death, or died within a few minutes. A great crowd had gathered and looked on with groans and cries of horror or warning, but were powerless to help. One or two brave men tried to catch the girls as they fell, but were only hurt themselves. The men from the next building had caught .up a long rope kept for such uses, and going on the roof held it over a window. John Sullivan saw it, and helped first one and another to catch it, and they were safely lowered. By that time the rest were quiet and crouching in the corners or on the floors, rapidly suffocating. Sullivan caught the rope, but had barely started downward when the flames reached out and burned the rope off, and he fell, never breathing afterward. Before this, however, another printer, who came up "with Sullivan, had remembered the skylight near the front and above the side of the room. Below it ran a binder’s bench piled high with stock. Mounting this, he threw open the skylight, and easily climbed out on the roof. Several 'others—bath boys and gitls—followed, but Sullivan and the S rest were too exerted to notice this means of escape, by which every one might.easily have been saved, since on the roof they could have walked a square in any direction away from the fire and out of the remotest danger. Meantime an alarm had brought the firemen. So well did they work that within fivie minutes they were able to enter the building and go to the fifth floor. Here the bodies of ten girls were found distorted in death. Some were shriveled by the heat till their skin peeled off. It was an awful tragedy, within a very short time. Not over twenty minutes had elapsed since the explosion of the benzine. The news seemed to permeate the city as by an electric shock. The street was packed with silent, sympathetic crowds. People sought for their dead children with blanched faces and a voiceless agony that was pitiful and met instant sympathy from thousands. The dead were borne out by the firemen and laid out for recognition for the few minutes before being removed to the morgue. An eyewitness says: “A loud scream attracted my attention, and, looking, I saw an awful sight. Black smoke was pouring from the roof and fifth-floor windows, ■which were crowded-with women and men. They were screaming and throwing themselves forward and backward from the ■windows. I saw seven girls and two men fall in a heap and lie motionless and bleeding. Cries of * Stop jumping, for God’s sake,’ arose from the multitude, which gathered in an instant, as they spied a rope thrown from the roof and dangling within reach of those in the window. A girl grasped it and climbed down nearly to the ground, and fell. A man—he was a hero, too—reached for it, but cries that it would not bear the weight of two checked him. The smoke was too much for him, and, sooner than jeopardize the girl, he leaped from the windo, and we picked him up u terribly broken. The flames follower them so closely that several were on fire ae they jumped from the window. The scen 0 was the most horrible *1 ever saw; Thj crowd cheered ever? time a victim mad j leap.” The scenes at Habig’s undertaking establishment, where the bodies were taken and where friends and relatives came to identify them, were of the most painful character. In one case a policeman of Covington, Ky., identified! his sisters Lizzie and Doliie Handel, who were ’twins. Mrs. Meier found the body of her daughter, and* had to be led away from the terrible sight. Mrs. Leaban had the awful experience of finding her three daughters amongthe dead. The fatal list, as now made up. is .Anna Bell, ■ aged 40; Doliie and Lizzie Handel, twin sisters, 20 years; Fannie Jones, 22 years; Delia, Katie, And MarVjLeaban, sisters, aged 23.14, and IG. respectively; Katie Ijawry, 29 years; Lizzie Annie Mclntyre. 20 years; Fannie Norton, 34 years; Katie and Mary Put»am, sisters, 22 and I'3, respectively; John Sullivan. 22 years; Lillie Wynn, 20 years. The injured, are: WfH Bishop, printer, 23 years, crushed and burned, will probably die; Josie “Hawks, broken leg; Emma Pinchback, unconscious, will probably die; Nannie Shepherd, head badly cut. A large portion of the foothill region of California is being ctevasted by such swarms of grasshoppers that they threaten to ainount to nothing Short of a plague. The Rev. M. J, Cramer, D. D., United States Minister ,to Switzerland, has been called to the chair of systematic theology in Boston University. i *-* - . ■-■ ■ I —— -f- i Australia lost $44,000,000 from pleuropneumonia, introduced by a single cow that was supposed to have recovered , The longest legitimate word in the English language ii disproportion ableness.