1 night on the street

Tuesday, March 4th is the 100th anniversary of one of the most tragic days in Cleveland history. The Collinwood school fire cost the lives 172 students, 2 teachers, and 1 rescuer…and changed the way school building were constructed in the United States.

March 4, 1908 was a cold, clear day in Collinwood. It was Ash Wednesday.

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The majority of the families living in Collinwood were immigrants, first – or at the most – second-generation Americans from central Europe

At 5714 Sackett Avenue 14-year-old Louise, 8-year-old John, 5-year-old George, and their baby sister Emma saw their father leave for work. Then George and Emma waved goodbye to their older sister and brother as they headed off toward what was known as Lake View School. Classes began as normal – with prayer – at 8:45 on that cold March morning.

The steam heating system in the basement of the school was pushing as much heat as it could into the classrooms. But at some point that morning, inside the walls of the school, a hot steam pipe lay against wooden joists…and the uninsulated pipe touching dry wood started a joist smoldering…and that grew into a flame.

The school building’s exterior was of masonry construction, while the entire interior was made of wood. That, added to the design of the building’s main staircase quickly turned the staircase into a wooden chimney, and the flames shot upward with intensity and speed. The panic sent children spilling into the hallways already filled with smoke, running for the stairwells…that were already in flames. The Collinwood and Cleveland fire department’s horse-drawn wagons were speeding to the scene…but it was already too late.

The building was filled with flames, and smoke, and the screams of children. From homes, businesses, and factories around Collinwood, people rushed to the scene… but they could only get there in time to see children leaping to their death from second and third-story windows.

With some of the upper door panels busted out, some parents tried to pull their children to safety through the openings…only to watch their children die from the fire…or die from suffocation – the bodies were packed so tightly at the doors…

We have no way of knowing when or how Louise and John’s mother and father found out about the death of their first child born in Germany, or their second, born in America, or how they told his younger brother and baby sister that Louise and John would never come home. But for them…as for the families of the other 170 children of Collinwood, it was to be a day of unimaginable grief …and unanswerable questions. How do innocent lives get cut so short…in such a preventable way? How do parents survive the horror of a child’s death? George and Emma’s mother and father had very little money…like most in the neighborhood, they knew expensive burials were out of the question. They chose to bury Louise and John in a common grave with their classmates at Lake View Cemetery where the memorial remains to this day.

Funerals and gravesite completely paid for by the churches of Collinwood

On Ash Wednesday, March 4, 1908, none of the parents of those 172 children had any inkling when they kissed their children and sent them off to school, that it would be the last time they would see them alive.

So what will the morning of March 4, 2008 be like…as each of our families go our separate ways? Don’t leave any hugs unhugged, and kisses unkissed, or any “I love you’s” unsaid…We may not know what today holds…but we know Who holds today. March 4, 1908 is most certainly a date that George, Emma, and their mother and father would have started differently if they had known that it would the last morning they would see Louise and John alive…Louise and John Zimmerman…the great-aunt and great-uncle I never met.

George, my grandfather, died when I was 5 years old…and great-aunt Emma was an infant that day, so the information I have on the fire has come from libraries and the internet…but as a believer in Christ, one thing I learn more and more every day is the brevity of life – that our time here is limited.