Peabody, Massachusetts, USA
1915 - 21 Children Die In School Fire

Flames Sweep Through Peabody, Mass., Building, Turning Fire Drill Into Panic.
Pupils Heaped At Door
Little Cripple Trips and Comrades Fall Over Her-nearly All the Victims Are Girls.
Heroic Work By Sisters
Drop Their Charges Into Life Nets-Nearly 600 Saved-No Fire Escapes on Building.

Peabody, Mass., Oct. 28. Twenty-one children, most of them girls, ranging in age from 7 to 17 years, lost their lives today in a fire which destroyed St. John’s Parochial School. Many other children were injured. The building which was three stories high, was without fire-escapes.

The 600 children in the building had hardly seated themselves for the morning session when the fire was discovered, and although most of them were guided to safety by Sisters of the Order of Notre Dame, who were their teachers, panic seized some as they neared the front door, and in their rush to escape they lost their footing and their bodies blocked the exit. It was in the front vestibule that nearly all the bodies were found.

Examination of the remains of the front doors of the school today showed that they swung outward. There had been a report that the doors swung into the hallway and that the crush against them, when they were partly opened, made it impossible for the children to get out.
Of the victims there had been identified tonight all more or less positively:

The Identified Dead.
BEAUCHAMP, MABEL, 11 years.
BURNS, NELLIE, 7 years.
BOURKE, FLORENCE, 12 years.
BRESNAHAN, HELEN, 17 years.
BOLESKY, ANNIE, 14 years.
CHEBATOR, PATRONI, 6 years.
COMEAU, ELIZABETH, 10 years.
DOHERTY, FLORENCE, 11 years.
ESSIAMBRE, IDA, 6 years.
FAY, MILDRED, 13 years.
HAYES, MARION.
KEEFE, HELEN H., 11 years.
MCCARTHY, MARY, 8 years.
MEAD, MARY, 16 years.
NOLAN, ELIZABETH, 17 years.
O’BRIEN, ANNIE M. 11 years.
SULLIVAN, MARY, 16 years.

All of the sisters escaped, but Mother Superior Marie Carmelita was seriously burned. At the convent house tonight it was said that her injuries probably were not fatal.

How the fire started may never be known. An early theory that a boiler explosion caused it having been dismissed, the State police officials tonight were of the opinion that a store room in the basement, where a gas meter was located, was its source, but investigation of the theory was difficult, as the place where the store room had been was entirely burned.

Tardy Pupil Smelled Smoke.
The first word of the fire is believed to have come from a tardy pupil, who smelled smoke and reported it to the Mother Superior. The children had just finished morning prayer, when the gong sounded for fire drill. Mother Marie hurried to tell the sisters of the actual danger, and the movements of the fire drill were quickly started.

A few days ago in a practice drill the building was emptied within two minutes. It would have been cleared in almost the same time today, in the opinion of the Rev. Nicholas J. Murphy, pastor of St. John’s Roman Catholic Church, but for the falling of a child, believed to be a cripple, in the front vestibule. Over her body child after child, fearful of the flames and pressed on by the crowd behind stumbled and fell. The opening was choked and further escape was in this way stopped.

Trouble at the rear door, which became jammed for a time, also impeded the movement of the children through the building. This exit was re-opened however, and many children escaped through it.

The classes of pupils, marshaled by the Sisters in the rooms and halls, had filed through the corridors and started down the stairs and were in orderly procession, notwithstanding curling plumes of smoke, until the blockade occurred at the doors. Then, with cries from those below in their ears, the children in the rear of the lines scattered to the rooms on all three floors of the building.

Coats Used as Life Nets.
Those on the lower floor dropped safely to the ground. From the second floor most of the children, supervised by the Sisters, jumped into the coats of firemen and bystanders which were held out to catch them.

Many of those who went to the windows of the upper story were warned against risking the long jump, and made their escape from windows below.

Some of the braver and more resourceful shinned down water spouts among them, Morris Harris, a boy of 14 years, who assisted his friend, Tom Shea, with only one leg, over a shaking spout. Two girls, who were dropped to the ground, sustained serious injuries, one, Marion Hayes, dying at a hospital tonight.

The teachers controlled the situation until the mishap at the front door. The Mother Superior herself sought out possible loiterers on the upper floors, and made certain that all the children left these floors before she did. Nobody was found above the first floor.

Sister Aldgeon, who assisted the Mother Superior in clearing the second floor, dropped more than a score of children into the arms of men waiting to catch them. Other Sisters assisted in the same way, while heads of classes remained with their charges and, so far as was possible, directed them to safety.

Through the undertaker’s shop, where in a back room were laid out the bodies taken from the fire, filed hundreds of persons tonight, both the morbidly curious and those who were looking for their dead. The bodies were badly charred so that the work of identification proceeded slowly.

Fire Laws Complied With.
Criticisms by citizens of the lack of fire escapes on the school building were met by statement from State and town officials that every requirement of law had been met. Deputy Chief George C. Neal of the State Police said that the loss of life “apparently was not due to any lack of fire precautions, but simply to the unfortunate place in which the fire started, almost under the front steps, and the accident which blocked the front door.” He said that the school house could have been better protected against fire by fireproofing doors and ceilings, but he regarded the building as it stood as complying with all laws.

The building was a brick structure of eleven rooms, nine of which were used as classrooms. Within it was finished entirely of wood, and the flames ran entirely through it, so that tonight only the outer walls were standing.

The fire spread with extreme rapidity. It swept through the three stories in less than five minutes. Angus McDonald of the State Police early advances the theory that it originated in a closet near the stairway and was cause by a hot air explosion. Michael Dunn, who lives near the school, said he heard a muffled explosion in the school building just before it was enveloped in flames.

When the ruins had cooled sufficiently officials made their way for a few feet into the basement. They found that the steam boiler, which was reported to have exploded, was intact. Joseph Donahue, the engineer of the building, declared that the blaze could not have originated from the boiler. He said he banked his fire before he left it at 8 o’clock this morning.

Rushed for Wrong Exit.
Wide stairways at either end of the interior led down to the exits. Under fire-drill discipline the little ones were marched through constantly thickening clouds of smoke to the ground floor, where the leaders lost their heads. Instead of passing out at the rear exit, according to rule, and as they had been trained, they made a dash for the front door and became jammed in the vestibule. Meantime the fire had eaten its way upward from directly under the front entrance, and the vestibule, crowded with pupils, presently was enveloped in flames.

Catherine M. O’Connell, 18, was among the first to escape, but when she got outside and found that her two little brothers were missing she broke away from the crowd and ran back into the building. The brothers were afterward reported safe, but no trace of Catherine could be found after the fire had burned itself out.

Catherine Phillips, one of those who escaped said:
“There was no confusion, and everything went smoothly until we came to a point about half way down the stairs between the first and second floors. Looking down over the heads of the children we saw a terrible scene. The younger children from the first floor were piled up in front of the doorway. The Sisters were doing their best to get the children through the doorway.

“Many of the little ones were terror-stricken and crying at the top of their lungs. Some had fainted and were being dragged along in the crush. A few had fallen to the floor. Some of the children, most of them under seven years, were struggling to keep their schoolmates on their feet. The Sisters were working frantically to rescue those who had fallen, but the task was almost hopeless.

“A small cloud of smoke was drifting through the doorway over the heads of the struggling, hysterical children, and it seemed that the smoke was coming from the basement doorway. Many of us were able to go around the side of the throng at the doorway and into the school room at the side of the first floor hallway. From the window of this school room we jumped to the ground.”

Distracted Parents Rush Police.
A large percentage of the pupils were children of foreign parentage. In the number were many of Irish or Italian descent. The first alarm brought a hundred distracted mothers to the school yard, where soon they were joined by other relatives of the pupils, until the building was surrounded by a great crowd of hysterical men and women, who rushed the police lines in a wild effort to reach their own. The police were powerless to stop the rush, but what they failed to do was accomplished presently by the flames, which, shooting from the windows of the building, held back the unhappy throng. The local firemen, unable to control the blaze, summoned aid from Salem, Danvers, and Marblehead, but this came too late.

Police and firemen bent their energies chiefly to pulling children from doors and windows. The Mother Superior dropped twenty-five of her charges from a window on the second floor, and they were caught in overcoats and blankets improvised as fire nets.

The building was erected a few years ago at a cost of about $100,000. In teaching the Mother Superior was assisted by fifteen other sisters.

The New York Times
New York, New York
October 29, 1915

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