Next week, if all goes according to plan, I'll have something really special for my readers. My sister Liza and I are finally following through with something we had discussed before the 2020 lockdown. On Tuesday I'll be getting up way earlier than my body normally likes to do, getting into her Jeep, and traveling four hours to Westmoreland County. We're going to pay our respects to the legendary Mr. Rogers and bring back pictures of his marker.
(Among others. His hometown is also the birthplace of the banana split, so I mean to get that marker too, and I think we're kind of required by law to have ice cream while we're there.)
But first, this week's quest. This is a sad one. The events of this marker led to profound overhauls in fire safety regulations, which is good, but those changes came at a terrible, terrible cost.
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| The marker stands at the entrance to Fairview Cemetery on West Philadelphia Street in Boyertown |
It was not, strictly speaking, an opera house. It was the Rhoads building, named for its owner, Dr. Thomas Rhoads. The first floor was a hardware store; the third floor was made up of offices and meeting rooms. The second floor was the "opera house" in question, being a sort of theater with a small stage; local organizations could rent the space for things like lectures, graduation ceremonies, and plays. There's no record of anyone ever actually performing opera there, ironically.
On January 13, 1908, the theater space was being used for a performance of The Scottish Reformation, a play written by Pennsylvania native Harriet Earhart Monroe. (Yes, that's Earhart as in Amelia Earhart. Harriet was Amelia's father's sister.) She and her sister, Della Mayers, were heavily involved in the production as directors, and had already shown the play throughout the northeastern United States in a number of places before bringing it to Boyertown. I can't find a lot of information about the play itself, except that it did have a musical aspect and that during intermissions there was a slide show and lecture which educated the audience about the historical background of the play.
Harriet was not present for the show on the night of January 13th, although Della was there. Records show that there were 312 tickets sold for the performance, but no one knows exactly how many people attended because there were a lot of people standing. The performance was sponsored by a local church and had drawn quite a bit of attention.
During the show's second intermission, Harry Fisher was operating the slide show projector and he set off a chain of events which led to one of the deadliest fires in the country's history. He was still pretty new at his job and he accidentally turned the wrong knob on the projector, causing the machine to emit gas. Some people smelled the gas and rushed to get out of the building, and this of course caught the attention of others and a bit of chaos began to build. The actors, waiting for the show to continue, were puzzled by the noise and peeked out from behind the curtains to see what was happening. In so doing, one of them knocked over a kerosene lamp positioned on top of a piano, which spilled oil onto the stage, and the lamp fell into the oil and set it on fire. The fire spread too quickly for the actors to stop it; it reached the tank that provided kerosene to the stage's footlights, and then the muslin stage curtain, and it swiftly climbed the curtain and set the ceiling ablaze. The ceiling was made of wood.
Naturally, everyone panicked. I can't say I wouldn't have done the same. The major problem was that the theater had only one entrance, and of the double doors, one was bolted shut. The other one opened inward, meaning that people rapidly became trapped and fought with each other in a desperate bid to escape. Some managed to open the windows and jump out, although I can't find a clear answer to whether any of those survived the fall. The building did have fire escapes, which is good, but the problem was that they were less than accessible - the only windows leading to them were three and a half feet above the floor, and latched shut, so the terrified theatergoers weren't likely to even think about how to get to them. There were a few other emergency exits, but they either weren't marked properly or they were somehow barricaded, making them useless to the panicked crowd.
Between the audience, the cast, and the crew, there were roughly 400 people crammed into that space when it caught fire. Within the hour, nearly half of them were dead. Some jumped to their deaths; some were crushed against that bolted door; some were trampled. John Graver, a firefighter who responded to the incident, was killed battling the blaze. Della Mayers, the playwright's sister and co-director, was among those who died in the fire. As the Allentown Morning Call reported, there was hardly a single household in Boyertown that wasn't mourning the loss of at least one relative or friend, and in some cases, whole families perished together. The coroner's report listed 110 female victims, 43 male victims, and 12 whose bodies were too badly burned to make a determination.
The sad thing is, Pennsylvania was a genuine pioneer in fire safety legislation. It was the first state in the nation to require buildings more than three stories high to have fire escapes, and to legislate the design and construction of those escapes. Unfortunately, between political influence (and possibly bribes) and the general incompetence of many fire inspectors, these forward-thinking laws were not often well enforced. Following the tragedy in Boyertown, coupled with a similar fire in Scranton just days later, the legislature went to work in 1909 to require even further safety measures; these included fireproof construction for projection booths. Buildings were also required to provide easily accessible, visibly marked fire escapes, more than one exit from upper floors, and doors that swung outward and remained unlocked in all theaters and public halls. Later bills would also add things like panic bars and properly marked exit signs.
As I mentioned in my post about the Boyertown Burial Casket Company, the Rhoads fire changed the way Boyertown (and surrounding areas) dealt with preserving bodies after death. Because of how many victims there were and how long it took to identify them, the relatively new science of embalming became much more acceptable to the locals, since it bought the officials extra time in which to identify many of the bodies and give closure to their loved ones. Some of the bodies were never identified, because they had been burned to such an extent that they were unrecognizable. Three temporary morgues were set up for the purpose of dealing with the calamity.
As for playwright Harriet, in addition to having to grieve the death of her sister, she was sued over the whole affair. People blamed her for the disaster, on account of her having employed an inexperienced projectionist, but she was ultimately acquitted. Some of the families also privately sued her for damages, but the results of those lawsuits have apparently not been recorded. The Boyertown tragedy was the last time that anyone ever performed The Scottish Reformation, and I can't even find where anyone has a copy of the script. Perhaps it too was a victim of the fire.
Update 10/1/2024: I recently returned to Boyertown and was able to explore the cemetery more thoroughly, so I now have pictures of the headstone on the mass grave of the unidentified victims. It's enormous and easy enough to spot when you get far enough into the cemetery grounds. (If you go there yourself, be careful driving around - like many cemeteries, it's very much uphill, and the road on which you drive is, shall we say, a bit nerve-wracking.) I can read the names, but some of the ages are difficult to make out, so I won't put them here lest I get them wrong; you can get a closer view of the stone by clicking on my pictures.
Sources and Further Reading:
Author unidentified. "167 bodies of victims of Boyertown holocaust are recovered." The Allentown Morning Call, January 15, 1908.
Ivory, Karen. Pennsylvania Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival. Morris Book Publishing, LLC, 2007.
Schneider, Mary Jane. Midwinter Mourning: The Boyertown Opera House Fire. MJS Publications, 1991.
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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