Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth

      The disposal of the more than three hundred bodies “was the most solemn task” confronting officials on Tuesday and Wednesday, as wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, and friends of the deceased continued to mass against “the iron bars of the main prison gate,” hoping and demanding to be admitted into the still-smoldering pen. Although an officer read off the names of survivors and those who had escaped injury, many in the throng refused to believe it until they could see them in person. “They stood in dazed groups after a night of horror splashed with acts of heroism by some of those who had been considered the most desperate inside the walls.”

      As soon as the mother and wife of Herbert Ross of Cleveland, serving time for carrying a concealed weapon, heard of the fire, they “departed so quickly” from the dinner table that they were still “attired in house dresses and aprons.” Newspapers lavished ink on them for making the drive to Columbus in two and a half hours, considered a “record” time for the era. Upon arrival they found to their great relief that Ross had been housed in another section, “serving as a waiter in the dining room,” and was unharmed.²²

      Once family members arrived and a protocol for collecting bodies had been established, they were instructed to pass through the outer gate and were handed pencils to fill out a reference book. Then they were taken in charge by the warden’s daughter, Amanda Thomas, and parole officer Dan Bonzo. Many stood around the main gate for hours until they received a burial permit that allowed them to reclaim the body once it was conveyed to the temporary morgue in the Horticulture Building at the Ohio State Fairgrounds.²³ This would serve as the staging area for medical response personnel, including doctors, embalmers, nurses, and other volunteers.

      The Horticulture Building, described by one reporter as a cattle barn, would serve as a combination morgue and hospital until the end of the week. Among the first on duty was the Red Cross, which set up a canteen at the fairgrounds. The Red Cross had charge of the fairgrounds and was assisted by members of the Columbus Junior League. As pleas for assistance continued to resonate throughout central Ohio, volunteers began arriving en masse. Among them was a delegation of physicians and students, led by Dr. J. C. McNamara from Marion. The Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, and St. Francis Hospital offered their services as well. The Salvation Army set up a canteen in front of the prison to pass out food, coffee, and succor to exhausted firemen, rescuers, and inmates who aided in the rescue.

      Every available physician was called to the disaster site, soon to be followed by an army of undertakers and coroners. They sped to the prison yard in trucks and private autos laden with spirits of ammonia, hoping to revive victims. But upon arrival they could do little to save the injured and dying in the prison yard, so they headed over to the state fairgrounds.

      The work of transferring the deceased to the fairgrounds went more slowly than expected. There were only eighteen regulation-sized stretchers available. Using any other type of makeshift conveyance, such as blankets and quilts, could not prevent “bodies from falling apart.”²⁴ As the convicts carried the dead bodies to the trucks from the prison yard, one observer was struck by their “Cries of Gangway,” repeated with “monotonous regularity.” A prisoner who soon after the fire wrote a novel based on his experiences at the Ohio Penitentiary had one of his fictional characters take exception to the way the bodies were handled during transport. “There is nothing nice about the way they are handled. They are hoisted, carried to a truck which has high sides, then flung on the floor in the manner, possibly, that a dealer in hogs would throw his dead purchases into a lorry. One atop another, legs and arms in a jumbled batch, the dead are piled into the truck.” Taking one last look at the trucks as they headed to the fairgrounds, he watched a “receding view of a mass of legs and arms, of blackened faces and tousled hair.”²⁵

      It was understood that the transporting of the bodies was supposed to be completed before dawn on Tuesday. Trucks and ambulances carried the lifeless bodies into the fairgrounds under heavy guard, in a process that to some observers resembled the ferrying of casualties from a battlefield. The large army trucks used for transporting the dead had been turned over to the state militia by the federal government shortly after World War I to be utilized as hearses. Few could have imagined they would be used for such a mass casualty event. One local reporter observed that “a caravan of death … rumbled in its grim way through the almost deserted streets of North Columbus early Tuesday morning.” Onlookers were struck by the “olive-drab army trucks looming gray under the garish light of street lamps” as they transported “their gruesome load of freight” from the penitentiary to the fairgrounds, where grieving relatives “braved the chill damp of the night to stand for hours waiting for the dreaded news.”²⁶ The first three trucks, driven by militiamen, delivered their “silent loads” at 1:35 a.m. Each truck transported six bodies. The grim task continued through the small hours before dawn, arriving on what one reporter dubbed “military schedule,” twenty minutes apart. The last of the bodies was removed from the Ohio Penitentiary by 4:14 a.m., making the dawn deadline.²⁷

      By Tuesday morning one hundred embalmers and assistants were on duty. Before them were 230 operating tables covered with white sheets, all set up to await the arrival of the motor transport unit transferring the bodies from the prison yard. Several hours before the bodies arrived, a “small army of state employees” had dusted off the tables, all “arranged in orderly rows,” in preparation. A pad of absorbent cotton and other supplies were placed on each table. At the head of each table was a headrest, “a small box, a foot long, a foot wide and about three feet deep.” A reporter noted that “in happier times these little boxes had housed prize apples.”²⁸

      Among the embalmers was the All-American Notre Dame football star Jack Cannon, one of the last “bareheaded” college football players, whom the noted sportswriter Grantland Rice would later call the best guard in Notre Dame’s history. A resident of Columbus, Cannon volunteered his services after letting it be known that he had studied embalming in college. He went directly to the Horticulture Building at the state fairgrounds soon after the first body was carried in, helped bring the second victim into the improvised morgue, and immediately set to work.²⁹

      Once the bodies arrived, they were rigorously inspected for identification before they were allowed to remain at the fairgrounds. An elaborate checking system was required before bodies could be turned over to relatives. All of the records for the convicts in the G&H cellblocks were relocated from the prison records office to the fairgrounds. To prevent mistakes, Bertillon measurements, prison numbers, and other forms of identification were checked. The potential for misidentification was brought home on Wednesday, when three men previously listed as dead turned up alive, including William Law and Andrew Jackson from Cleveland and one of two Cincinnati brothers.³⁰ One final step was to require all convicts to return to the very cells they had cried to be released from less than forty-eight hours earlier. With close to fifty bodies so charred and disfigured that no forensic tools at the time could identify them, a process of elimination was used. Each of the cells where the fire

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