Volume 15 , Issue 29

One Hundred Years Ago - 22 July 1913

One hundred years ago today, July 22 (1913), Tuesday, we find in The Evening World, NY, NY, the front page headlines read: "125 Girls In Panic Leap From Windows; 25 Known To Be Dead."

Flames swept through Binghamton factory with almost incredible rapidity, repeating in miniature the Triangle disaster. The alarm was mistaken for summons to drill. The walls of the structure fell and the fire spreads rapidly to several of the surrounding buildings.

Binghamton, July 22 (1913) -- A Triangle fire in miniature cost twenty-five lives in the factory of the Freeman Overall Company at No. 17 Wall Street in this city at 2:30 o'clock this afternoon. The estimate of twenty-five dead is made without an opportunity for examination of the ruins, which were still blistering hot late in the evening. It is believed that the number of dead may exceed twenty-five. Only one man lost his life so far as is known.

The Freeman Overall Company occupied a four-story brick building. There were 125 girls employed int eh plant. The fire started on the second floor and went up to the roof like a flash of light.

There were fire escapes on the building in the rear, but the spread of the flames wa so rapid that the girls on the upper floors working in the front of the building were unable to reach them. Besides they were slow in starting at the first alarm, believing it to be part of a fire drill.

Although the building was of what is called approved "factory construction," it might as well have been a frame shack for all the resistance it offered to the flames. Within three minutes after the fire was discovered under a stairway the staircases were shut off, the third floor had been invaded, the halls were impassable and fire and smoke were belching from the front windows of the second and third floors. Those on the top floor were hopelessly penned in, except as the fire escape offered opportunity for descent to the ground.

All the windows and doors were open, and within ten minutes the building was a great flue from cellar to roof. By the time the forest firemen reached the scene the heat from the fire was breaking window panes across the street and blistering grass and the leaves of trees half a block away.

In less than half an hour after the first alarm was sounded the four-story building was a smoking mass of ruins flat with the street. All four walls and the roof fell in, according to those who were close enough to see, at the same time. The collapse forced out and eruption of fire and cinders and hot smoke that drove away everybody in the vicinity.

Women jumped from the windows when they might have taken a chance at the fire-escape. Others stood on the fire-escape ladders or landings shrieking until the flames enveloped them. Then they jumped with their clothes ablaze, or, mad with pain and fright, fled back into the furnace, and went down with the final crash. The entire fire-fighting apparatus of Binghamton was called out to fight the fire, but the tragedy had reached a conclusion before the full force had assembled. All the ambulances in the city, public and private, were summoned and automobiles were commandeered by the police and pressed into service taking the injured to the hospitals.

Nearly every person who escaped death on the upper floors was hurt. Reports front he hospitals indicated that the death list would be swelled by fatalities among those who were injured.

The fire mushroomed out from the burning building at the height of its intensity and surrounding buildings were soon aflame. The spread of the flames was too rapid to allow of any attempt at rescue. It was all over before the confused firemen could raise a ladder. The heat became so intense that the pipe men were forced to flee before it and the streams of water turned to steam before they struck the blazing mass.

As in the Triangle fire in New York many were crushed to death by jumping from the top floor windows and landing on the stone pavements. The first fire company to arrive stumbled over two bodies, those of a man and a woman, lying at the foot of the fire-escape in the rear of the building. Other bodies were found later, in the rear and in front, but it is believed that the both of the victims perished on the third and fourth floors and went down into the ruins.

E. J. Lawrence, bookkeeper of the company, said he was working in the office when the first alarm sounded. The flames were under the front stairway. There also was a rear stairway and fire-escapes at the south side of the building. Most of the women were employees in the machine operating room on the fourth floor. They made no attempt to hurry from the building at first, thinking that the alarm was for a fire drill. Messengers then rushed through the building to drive the women out.

Lawrence said, "Just then the whole building burst into flames. It was of the usual factory construction, with timber supports and brick walls. But it went up as though it had been powder. When the flames rushed up the from stairway it was awful. The women were in a panic in an instant. They rushed to the fire escape and many of them leaped from the windows."

"I had 125 names on my patrols and some of the employees were gone at vacation. The lists were all in the safe and are burned, so that it is impossible to call the roll and get a line on those who are missing."

There was some delay in answering the alarm, The fire station was called first on one telephone, then on the other, without results, for an alarm had just come in calling the companies to the box on the corner.

Ruth Prouty, aged seventeen years, whose home was at No. 17 Grant street, Fort Jervis, and whose back is broken, was the only one of the victims conscious at the hospital. The doctors say that she will die.

Forty Girls Die In Factory Fire

The Ogden Standard, Ogden City, Utah, reported on it's front page headlines that "Forty Girls Die In Factory Fire." The overall plant at Binghamton, New York, burned to the ground in twenty minutes. Police believed that few of the 120 girls were successful in making their escape. They were caught like rats in a trap.

Bodies of two girls were found lying on a side street, completely cut in two. Heart rending scenes when girls clinging to the fire escapes, were swept by sheets of flame or jumped from factory windows. Many were badly injured in the hospitals.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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