On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City were getting ready to go home after a long day. They were tidying up their workspaces and brushing fabric scraps off the tables and into large bins. Someone on the 8th floor carelessly threw a match or cigarette butt into one of those bins, and within minutes, flames overtook the factory floors.
Panic workers - most of them female immigrants - rushed to evacuate, and many on the 9th floor became trapped. There were two exits on that floor, but one was blocked by fire and the other was locked - a precaution that owners deemed necessary to present theft to prevent thefts by workers. The terrified laborers were faced with two choices: wait for rescue (and likely die in the fire) or jump from the windows. Many chose to jump. Overall 146 workers died in the tragedy.
Austrian immigrant Rose Rosenfeld survived by figuring out how the executives were handling the situation. Seventeen-year-old Rosenfeld hopped a freight elevator to the roof, where she was rescued by firefighters. When her bosses tried to bribe her to testify that the doors had not been locked, Rosenfeld refused. The tragedy brought about an investigation of the welfare and safety of sweatshop workers, which resulted in new labor laws.
Rosenfeld's anger at the needless death lasted a very long lifetime. She promoted workplace safety reform by retelling her story. She died on February 5th 2001, at age 107 - the last survivor of the triangle shirt waste fire.
The story is a familiar one: Poor old Mrs O'Leary left a kerosene lantern burning in her barn. A cow kicked over the lantern, and the hay caught fire. The winds blew the flames, and they quickly spread through the wooden city, destroying most of downtown on those fateful three days in October, 1871.
The story that Mrs O'Leary and her cow were the culprits spread around the city before the flames had even stopped smoldering. The cow was butchered and served up as Oxtail Soup at the Royal Palm, a posh downtown restaurant on Thanksgiving Day, a month after the fire. The O'Learys had to go into hiding because they feared being lynched.
We now know that the story was total nonsense. While the fire did start in the O'Leary Barn, the story that poor Mrs. O'Leary or her cow was responsible was invented by a reporter who thought it made for a colorful story. The local press, much of which was openly anti-Irish, picked up on the story and ran with it; the Tribune spoke of Mrs. O'Leary's typical "Irish know-nothingness." Mr.s O'Leary was hounded on the anniversary of the fire for the rest of her life. Not surprisingly, she developed a lifelong hatred for reporters, and she never allowed herself to be photographed.
So, if it wasn't Mrs O'leary, what did cause the fire? Lots of stories have gone around over the years. More than one person has sheepishly admitted to family members in their old age that they were the cause of the fire, whether by knocking burning ashes from a clay pipe into the hay or by sneaking into the barn to milk the cow on a dare, causing the irate cow to start kicking. They can't all have been telling the truth, though.
One even stranger theory alleges that the fire was actually caused by a meteor that crashed down on the day of the fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The meteor certainly caused major fires throughout Wisconsin - some of which were actually even bigger than the one that blazed in Chicago. No one is entirely sure whether the fire could possibly have traveled all the way south to Chicago (and ended up localized in a barn southwest of the Loop, skipping everything west of Halsted and north of Taylor Street in the process). Still, it seems an awfully funny coincidence that major fires would have broken out in two nearby areas with totally different clauses on the same day.
Mrs. O'Leary's sun offered another explanation. Young James O'Leary grew up to be "Big Jim" O'Leary, a stockyards saloonkeeper and gambling king. When a statement was made in the Tribune that the fire had been started by two young men trying to milk the cow in order to make whiskey punch, he was outraged.
"The true cause of the fire has never been told," he said to a Tribune reporter in 1904. "But I'll speak out. Story about the cow kicking over the lamp was the monumental fake of the last century. I know what I'm talking about when I say that the fire was caused by spontaneous combustion!"
That's right. Spontaneous combustion.
According to Big Jim, his father had just purchased some mysterious green hay, which, he said, had spontaneously combusted in the hayloft.
Spontaneous combustion may sound crazy, but the National AgSafety database warns that storing hay that is wet and or green can result in hay fires. While the true origin of the fire will probably never be definitively known, it's certainly a possibility. In the late 20th century, the city finally issued an apology to poor Mrs O'Leary.
I'm helping! I really am.
Copyright © 2024 Briar Lake Unit Owners Association - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy