Hearts Afire (20 page)

When the women reached this scene they shrieked as though bereft of all
their kindred, but the majority of them were forced to admit that they knew no
one among the dead. Occasionally some agonized mother or wife recognized the
charred remains of a loved one, and the woman wept as only a woman can weep.

Keeper McGuire, who has witnessed much sorrow in his place, and who is
supposed to have a heart of adamant, wiped tears from his eyes, and then tried
to excuse himself by saying: “This is too much. I am almost unnerved.”

Occasionally some plain, methodical person entered, and, through close
searching, discovered one who was known to him. In a businesslike way the
discoverer pinned a card or a slip of paper, bearing the man’s name, to what
remained of the clothing. Young and giddy girls, who should have been chastised
for their impudence, flaunted themselves in the presence of distressed
visitors, and seemed to enjoy their trip through the Morgue.

On each side of the building is a yard, and there are many windows. Small
boys and stalwart men peered through these windows and indulged in expressions
that were unseemly. This outside rabble became so unruly that an additional
force of police was called upon to prevent a crush into the building.

None of the bodies were put on the slabs. All were on the flooring. The
faces were so blackened by the fire that they could not be recognized, and it
was only through clothing or jewelry that any were identified. The undertakers
of Brooklyn combined together and volunteered their services in behalf of the
sorrow-stricken families. They were of very great assistance to the police in
preventing professional mourners from robbing the dead. One woman recognized
her brother when she discovered a stud in his shirt bosom. Another woman, with
a small piece of cloth and a piece of shirt bosom, identified her husband, and
saying, “He has $100 in his pockets,” put her hand in his vest pocket and took
therefrom that amount.

The arms of nearly all the dead were fixed as though shielding their faces,
and one woman had drawn her clothing over her face and clinched her hands above
her forehead. Two young men were grappled together as though they had had a
personal encounter in an attempt to escape from the theater. Others lay on
their sides in the manner of persons who thus slumber. Their watch chains and
other jewelry were beautifully bright, and the clothing of all was blackened
through the fire.

In only about one-third of the cases were the limbs exposed through the torn
and burned clothing. Uplifted hands, whose fingers were shining bones, bore
golden rings, and shoeless feet glistened in their whiteness. The hair and
whiskers were gone, and faces were terribly scarred. A few of the bodies were
burned to a crisp, and these were put into rough pine boxes, and all hope for
their identification was given up.

Until late in the afternoon, men, women, and children flocked to the
Washington street station to tell of fathers, husbands, brothers, and children
who had not returned to their homes since the evening previous. Hour by hour
the list of missing persons increased in numbers until it comprised nearly 200
names. All who made inquiry for friends or relatives were necessarily
disappointed, for the blackened, charred bodies were few of them in a condition
to be identified. Strong men, who had kept up both heart and hope, broke down
and sobbed like women when they learned their own flesh and blood might never
be discovered from out of the scores of shapeless trunks that were being
exhumed from the ruins. Women came in sobbing and went away convulsed with
grief. The policemen themselves often surrendered their forced self-possession
and sobbed aloud.

In the evening the work was continued by the aid of calcium lights. It was
thought best to discontinue the removal of the bodies from the rear through
Theater alley to Myrtle
avenue
. Sixty-seven in all had
been taken out that way. The main entrance, with the ghastly burdens still regularly
coming out of it, was thrown into bold relief. The burner and lantern had been
knocked off the street lamp over the way, and a great flame of gas blazed and
flared into the air, lighting up the scorched and splintered doorway and the
upturned faces of the throng. A calcium light on the sidewalk near the door
illumined the corridor to the point where the floor had broken, and there
another was fixed whose rays shone directly into the deep pit in which the
earlier search had discovered the horrible mass of charred human bodies.

This pit was the cellar of the main corridor, and its ruins were separated
from the debris in the auditorium by the strong foundation wall that had borne
the gallery columns. It was not until nine o’clock that this cellar, about
twelve feet wide, and running through to the foundation wall on the alley side,
was cleared. Over one hundred and fifty bodies had been removed from it.

Toward the rear fewer were found, and those were evidently not from the gallery,
as fragments of kid gloves could be seen on the fingers of the blackened hands,
some of which still clutched opera glasses. These bodies were more thoroughly
calcined
than those first found, and not unfrequently the
firemen were able to put two or three into one box.

After dark the orders against admitting outsiders to the ruins were more
strictly enforced. Among those admitted was the foreman of the Grand Jury, W.W.
Shumway. A calcium light from the alley wall shone over the ruins of the
auditorium, and here the firemen began work shortly after nine o’clock. In
addition to the lime light, oil lamps with reflectors and lanterns were used.

In this fitful glare the firemen, their faces pallid from fatigue and
hunger, toiled on without a word. The first body found in the auditorium was on
the Theater alley side. Its position indicates that the victim had reached a
window when he was struck down.

Some friends of Mr. Murdoch were very anxious that an early effort should be
made to recover his body. His mother was expected to arrive in the city during
the evening, he having sent for her a few days before. About nine o’clock a
stream of water was put upon the ruins in the northeast corner to cool the
immense pile of bricks under which the body was thought to lie.

The firemen were greatly impeded by the clouds of steam. They made their way
from the southern end toward the stage. The broken wall lay in great lumps of
brick and mortar. About halfway toward the stage shapeless human flesh was
found crushed between two huge masses which had protected it from the flames
that had consumed all the rest of the body. It was long before the bricks could
be sufficiently cooled to admit the removal of this fragment. It was feared all
the bodies in this part of the ruins had been similarly or more thoroughly
consumed, owing to the intense heat from the inflammable stage fixtures.

The interior of the Adams Street Market presented at night a weirdly
horrible sight. Disuse had made the place grimy. The gas fixtures had been removed,
and candle light had to be used. The bodies were in rows that reached the
entire length of the long apartment. On the breast of each was a lighted candle
held in a small block of wood. Candles were also stuck on the hooks that had
once been used to hang meat on, and lanterns helped to illuminate the spacious
place; but the combined light was not sufficient to rid the corners of dark
shadows. The bodies were in strained shapes, as though death had stopped them
in a writhing struggle. Their arms were raised to their faces in most
instances, the gesture suggesting suffocation or warding off heat. The charring
made them appalling to look at. At an old counter officers added to lists the
names of the few who were from time to time identified.

Articles taken from the bodies were in a basket, enveloped and numbered, and
corresponding numbers were written on slips of paper and pinned to the rags
that still clung to the corpses. Men and women passed from body to body,
seeking friends or relatives, examining the bits of clothing, holding the
candles close to the blackened faces, and looking for scars or other marks that
might make recognition possible. They were wonderfully composed in manner, the
only outbreaks of feeling being when a search was successful, and that was very
rare. They were in the main of the poor class, such as occupy the galleries of
theaters. They were persistent in their sad task, going along the rows of
ill-shaped remains without missing a thing that promised identification. In
several instances importunate appeals were made for permission to remove
recognized remains, but the coroners decided not to grant that privilege until
the next day.

On the next morning (December 7th) the confusion was less at the scene of
the awful catastrophe, but the solemn gloom was deeper than before, the
excitement was nearly as great, and the under-currents of sympathy more
intense. There was a gloom in Brooklyn which could be felt even in the streets.
There was but one topic of conversation. Men, women, and children thought and
talked of little else than the Brooklyn Theater and the burned dead beneath its
ruins. On the sidewalks, in the street cars, on the ferry-boats, there was one
and the same subject of interest. In the neighborhood of the theater itself the
excitement was at its height. But there was little to be seen that could either
stimulate or gratify curiosity. Two or three undertaker’s wagons with the ugly
coffins from the dead-house, were in attendance, but the uninterrupted
procession of corpses, which was so horrible a feature of the scene on
Wednesday, ended late at night, and on this morning there was nothing to see
save the smoldering ruins of the theater. There was only the great void where
the theater had stood, a mere rim of crumbling walls, scarcely breast high,
enclosing immense heaps of brick and rubbish, from which columns of steam arose
in the air.

A surging mass of people occupied the sidewalk in front of the dead-house,
and stretched into the middle of the street, and men and boys clambered upon
fences and wagons in the neighborhood, and gazed intently at the blank walls of
the building. Policemen guarded the main entrance and the iron gateway before
it. No permits for admission were demanded of those persons who could satisfy
the officers that they had lost friends or relatives by the fire. They were
allowed to enter from time to time, passing in the front door and through the
room on the right-hand, which contained about thirty bodies, lying on the
floor, none of them identified; so, through a smaller room at the further end
of the building, back to the left-hand room, in which some of the corpses were
lying upon marble slabs and tables in the center. Upon such bits of clothing as
remained upon the bodies, numbers, written hastily with lead-pencils on bits of
paper, had been pinned; and where a body had been recognized, the name and
address were added to the number. Then, upon receipt of the coroner’s
permission, the corpse was placed in a plain deal coffin and sent to the
address given by the persons who had claimed it.

On Friday morning (December 8th) the work of removing and examining the
ruins was suspended, it being deemed unsafe to proceed any further while the
walls remained in such an unsafe position. The dangerous parts of the walls were,
however, braced, and the firemen resumed their labors in the afternoon.

During Friday night and early Saturday morning a large number of small
pieces of bodies, and several heads, were discovered, and the trunk of a body
which was identified as that of Mr. Murdoch. The remains were taken in charge
by an undertaker.

Many of the bodies were so mangled and charred that it was impossible to
identify them, and it was determined by the Board of Aldermen to bury these at
the public expense. The scenes at the Morgue and the old market on Saturday
morning were, if possible, more heartrending and horrible than anything that
had occurred in those places since the burning of the theater. The undertakers
wagons rattled up to the door of the old market by dozens, and the coffins of
stained and polished wood, studded with silver nails, were ranged in rows on
the market floor, beside the black, gnarled things that had been human bodies.
Outside a motley crowd of men, women, and boys pressed close to the doors and
tried to get past the police lines in order to witness the work of putting the
stiffened and distorted bodies into the narrow coffins. Wandering among the
ghastly rows was the usual throng of sight-seers and mourners searching for
friends.

Soon after one o’clock the last coffin was taken from the old market, and
the driver who carried it hurried away after the others. The crowd around the
door took a last glance at the blackened floors inside, as though the horrible
place had fascinated them, and then chased the wagons and carriages that were
going to join the procession.

The funeral services were held in the Church of “The Little Church
Around
the Corner.” The services were very impressive, and
the attendance was very large. Dr. Houghton conducted. The remains of Mr.
Burroughs were placed in the receiving vault of the Second Street Cemetery, and
those of Mr. Murdoch were taken to Philadelphia, and buried on Monday in
Woodland Cemetery, the funeral services being conducted in St. Peter’s P.E.
Church.

Stuart Campbell Hand, a young reporter on the staff of the Commercial
Advertiser of New York, is among the victims of the calamity. He is known to
have visited the theater on the night of the fire, and has not been seen since.
He was only eighteen years old.

William L. Donnelly, another young reporter, left his home on the evening of
the fire to visit the theater, and was never seen alive again. He had just
returned to New York from a journalistic trip to the West. Among the charred
remains his stepfather felt assured he had discovered poor Donnelly’s body,
identifying it by several articles of clothing; but as these articles were
partly divided between two crisped trunks his mother declined to acquiesce in
the identification, for fear of receiving the wrong body.