Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
cells.
Baldwin and Little recovered after getting some fresh air out in the yard and returned to aid the rescue efforts in the doomed cellblock. But in the meantime the dense smoke had become even more suffocating. The valiant keepers could go no higher than the fifth tier before retreating. Curiously, some witnesses later reported seeing the two guards on the fourth tier and as high as the sixth, but as with so many other observations, the tumult of the night’s events prevented the substantiation of many statements.
Guards Baldwin and Little, whose presence the warden regarded as a “godsend,” would later testify, as mentioned above, that the warden only took time to shout several cryptic orders to them in the guardroom before disappearing outside. However, as the warden told it, “I told guards to take those keys and go down there.” His badinage with the inquisitors the following day sounded like part of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” sketch. When the warden was asked if he had specifically told them what to do when they got down to G&H with the keys, Thomas, obviously losing patience, responded, “Unlock the prisoners; wouldn’t take the keys down there and play with them.” However, both sides would eventually agree that he probably only said, “Get the keys down quickly.”28
While it is uncertain who was actually the first to observe the fire, “it was presumably seen by several at about the same time.” By some accounts “a guard in the tower on the outside wall,” a short distance beyond the north end of the building where the fire originated, was among the first and “called someone at street level who pulled fire alarm box 261, at the head of Dublin St.”29 A day guard named Porter, working near the wagon stockade, testified that he had turned in the fire alarm three times beginning around 5:40 before firing his rifle to get someone’s attention.
It is also conceivable that the fire was first observed by a trustee who was driving back from town to the prison, after running an errand for the warden’s wife, sometime between 5:30 and 5:35. When he noticed smoke outside the cell-house structure, he went to a fire-alarm box and turned in the first fire alarm at exactly 5:39, the time when Columbus fire chief A. R. Nice claimed he received the first alarm from box 261, outside the penitentiary on the corner of Dennison and Dublin Avenues. This clearly contradicted the claim of Liston Schooley in the deputy warden’s office that his friend had notified the fire department around 5:20. Times were logged immediately at the firehouse, making the fire company’s reported times the most reliable. But the time of this first fire alarm was almost twenty minutes later than the times reported by convicts and guards inside the walls. By 5:39 the fire already had an almost half-hour head start. During the subsequent Board of Inquiry that began the day after the fire, Nice declared that all could have been saved if they had been released from cells as soon as fire was discovered. He told the board that “there must have been undue delay because the first alarms came from a box outside the prison walls,” rather than from inside the facility when smoke was first spotted.30
At 5: 40 another alarm was received from the box closest to the penitentiary. After another alarm at 5:42, the fire chief left his home on Gilbert Street and arrived at the Spring Street gate on the corner of Spring and Dennison Streets within seven minutes, where he was met by assistant fire chief Ogburn, who had responded with Company #1. Seeing the fire burning at the north end of the building, Nice, he later testified, turned in the fourth alarm at 6:03, summoning more fire companies to the scene.
Deputy Warden James C. Woodard, who had been on a brief hiatus and was on his way back to the prison when he was alerted to the brewing disaster, arrived close to the same time the fire department did. The warden recalled telling Woodard to “hustle right inside, you take care of the inside and I will take care of the outside.”31 After making sure that prisoners were being released from their cells in G&H, Woodard ordered prisoners from the adjoining E&F dorm to be released as well. As smoke threatened the upper blocks of A&B and C&D, the infamous White City (so named because the interior was painted white), Woodard, fearing that flames might follow, returned to the guardroom, grabbed keys for those blocks and released its inmates into the prison yard.
Woodard was careful to prevent convicts in the so-called Bad Boy Company, Company K, from also being released. To assuage their fears, he told Company K convicts that the fire did not yet pose a threat to them and promised to return and release them if it did.32 Woodard was quite sensitive to claims made later on that some of the K Company convicts actually had been let out of their cells. “While it is said some of them was in the yard, but there wasn’t,” he testified later, explaining that this rumor got started “when a man without clothes went to the commissary and got whatever he could,’ which turned out to be the same “striped shirts and striped coats” worn by K Company.33 For good measure he placed death row prisoners in solitary cells for safety as well.
In the fire’s immediate aftermath, much of the blame for the tragedy would be directed at Warden Thomas, in no small part due to his decision to station himself where he did “to prevent escapes.” To be fair, the warden’s main concern, like that of other big house wardens of the era, was to prevent inmates from escaping at any cost. It was an era when keeping inmates behind bars always took precedence over getting them out of their cells safely in an emergency. The warden later admitted that “he considered the menace of a possible break for liberty by the prisoners as more pressing than the fire itself.” He also assumed that the proximity of the prison to the fire department, just blocks away, was his ace in the hole. But he placed too much faith in the firefighters’ response time.
Convinced that the fire was part of a larger escape attempt, the warden phoned the headquarters of the 166th Infantry Regiment of the Ohio Militia for support and went out to the street to await their arrival. As he left, he issued orders to shoot any escapees.34 When Columbus city police officers and federal troops from Fort Hayes arrived before the guardsmen, the warden, some ten minutes after positioning himself outside the walls, put his defensive strategy into practice, ordering the troops to facilitate the entry of the fire department through the stockade gate. By 6 p.m., Columbus city police had been ordered into the prison yard to restore a semblance of order. They were soon joined by other day guards. Unaware of the scale of the pending disaster, guards rushed to and fro, adding to the general disorder, picking up machine guns and shotguns, shouting for ammo, and preparing for a prison riot, while outside, grim-faced guards, police, and members of the arriving military units trained their gimlet eyes and weapons on the walls.
As the subsequent Board of Inquiry would prove, the warden had plenty of reasons to keep himself scarce within the prison walls. Father Albert O’Brien, who had reported that the convicts were probably ready to kill the warden if he stepped inside the prison courtyard during the pandemonium, added, “Those men had no thought of escape. They were thinking of those men perishing in the flames like moths. They were enraged because of the utter helplessness; because they were beyond the help of those gathered outside the wall.” When the warden finally entered the walls on Wednesday, two days after the fire, hundreds of convicts “let loose a crescendo of jeers and catcalls.”
There is some controversy over when Little and Baldwin retrieved the keys for the endangered cellblocks. Most accounts agree with their claim that Little already had the range keys in his pocket before he had heard anything about a fire.35 The two guards had established a well-rehearsed routine and had an understanding that Little would always open the small door in the guardroom containing the keys when they got ready to go on shift, take one set of keys, and carry it on to the cellblock. As night guards on G&H, either Baldwin or Little would work on the bottom range and hold on to the bottom range key while the other took the keys to the higher ranges. They would then switch range watch and