File:110th anniversary - Collinwood School Fire - Lake View Cemetery (39908846764).jpg

110th anniversary observance of the Collinwood School Fire, at the Collinwood School Fire Memorial in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.

On March 4, 1908, the Lake View School in the village of Collinwood, Ohio, (east of Cleveland) burns, killing 172 children, two teachers, and one firefighter.

It is the worst school fire in American history.

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Although today Collinwood is part of Cleveland, in 1908 the area was an independent village on Cleveland's eastern border.

Collinwood built the Lake View School in 1902 and doubled its size in 1906. The Neoclassical structure was built around a wood frame, with interior wood floor beams and walls. Stairways were broad and open. The windows were extremely high, to let in as much natural light as possible, and the facade was of masonry. There was a main entrance at the front of the school, with a massive Greek arch over the doors. There was also a small rear exit, reached via a narrow hallway.

The school's masonry-over-wood design and lack of exits and fire escapes was common in tens of thousands of communities nationwide. It was an inexpensive design that small communities could afford, but it looked fantastic and impressed on students and local citizens the importance of education.

School design in America in the latter part of the 1800s emphaszied control over student movement. This was especially true in cities with large immigrant populations like greater Cleveland, because immigrants were seen as barely-civilized people who needed extensive control in order to learn the code of behavior appropriate to a modern society. Classrooms had a single door, guarded by the teacher. Hallways and stairs were extremely wide, to permit the easy flow of students between classes and prevent bunching and groups of kids from talking. The lack of entrances/exits was designed to allow teachers to supervise and count students as they entered, and to prevent students from leaving the building surreptitiously during the day. The single fire escape, at the rear of the building, was a standard design.

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Architects were already recommending that schools be built of non-combustile materials like iron, steel, and concrete, and that stairways have doors that could be closed in case of fire. Classrooms needed more than one door. They counseled numerous and easily-accessed fire exits, and fire escapes at the side and rear of all structures that reached to the ground.

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Shortly after 9 AM on March 4, fire broke out in the Collinwood school's basement. Although official cause of the fire was determined at the time, historians now believe that a steam heat pipe in the basement near the front of the school became overheated. It caused the wooden joists above it to ignite.

At 9:30 AM, a little girl on the first floor saw smoke rising up the stairway from the basement. The school janitor ran for the front door, flinging it open to help students escape. The inrush of air fanned the flames...

The school's gong sounded three times -- signal for a fire alarm. Few teachers or students were worried, assuming it was a fire drill. They calmly lined up to exit their classrooms.

Then students began to smell smoke.

The main floor of the school was reached by entering the huge arched front doors and ascending a short staircase. The fire spread to the wooden substructure supporting staircase, causing it to collapse just minutes after the

The wooden joists supporting the first floor were now ablaze, weakening the floor. Space between the masonry facade and the interior wooden walls -- design to insulant the building with an air pocket -- now acted like a chimney. Fire raced up the walls to the second and third floors. Wooden joists beneath these floors began to burn near the exterior walls.

Panicked teachers and children began racing down the broad staircases to the main floor. Realizing that the front stairs had collapsed and were ablaze, they ran for the rear fire exit.

To reach the rear fire exit, children had to go down a short flight of steps and make a right and then left turn. After passing through a door, they had to run down a short hallway to rear the exterior door.

As the screaming children ran for the door, someone tripped just a few feet shy of the exit. More children tripped over the fallen body. Other children tried to climb over the pile of bodies, tripping and falling. More and more children panicked, shrieking as they tried to climb over the growing pile. Teacher Katherine Weiler, trying to help, was trampled to death by her own students.

Nineteen children died there, within feet of safety. Teachers and members of the public tried to pull the bodies loose, but the pile was too tightly jammed. Children begged their parents to save them. Mothers, running from their homes, had to be held back from the flames. Fathers, running to the school from work in the nearby railyards, tried to hammer down the walls to get inside.

One mother saw her daughter's hand sticking out of the pile of bodies, clutching at the air. She could hear her daughter's muffled cries for help. She held her daughter's hand as her child burned alive.

Once the first floor was unavailable, teachers tried to get the panicked children back upstairs to use the fire escape. Children stumbled and fell on the iron stairs, and others tripped over them. Kids fell two, sometimes three stories to the hard-packed earth below.

As children reached the bottom of the fire escape -- they realized it did not reach the ground. It ended eight feet in the air, to prevent vandals and thieves from entering the building. Onlooks rushed to the bottom of the fire escape, braving death themselves to catch children as the kids leapt from the last iron rung.

The village had a three-person volunteer fire department. It had no ladder. Its horse-drawn, steam-powered engine could not generate enough pressure to produce more than a limp stream of water that turned to steam the moment it hit the inferno.

Within 20 minutes, the interior of the building collapsed. Onlookers wept as an 11-year-old boy appeared at a window, having climbed the burning staircases to reach the attic. He climbed a column, seeking to escape out an attic window. But the column gave way -- tumbling backward. The boy fell into the inferno, shrieking, as the crowd moaned in despair.

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Only 194 of the school's 366 children survived.

The fire cooled enough by the afternoon to permit the undertakers to begin doing their grisly job.

Found in the rubble was a broken slate marked with the chalk words, "I like to go to school..."

The charred bodies were taken to an empty freight storage warehouse near the rail yards. Some of the bodies were so badly burned that they came apart during the short trip, losing limbs and heads. Ambulance drivers would open the doors to discover body parts littering the floor of their vehicles.

The bodies were sorted by gender, and placed ten to a row. Each was covered with a blanket. Railroad workers stood sentry at each row, and local nurses rushed to the scene to assist swooning parents.

Only 10 parents at a time were permitted in the makeshift morgue. Most of the bodies were charred beyond recognition. Some were identifiable by the rings or watches they wore. A few had unique suspender or belt buckles. Some were identified only because their body lay curled next to a recognizable sibling or friend. A dog identified its master by curling up next to her body.

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Twisted rumors flew: Some accused janitor Fritz Hirter (who had lost three of his four children in the fire) of abandoning his post to have tea. Others claimed that the doors opened inward, trapping the children. Some said the fire was caused by girls smoking in the basement.

During the inquest, the coroner held the architects blameless. They had designed the best building they could with the funds given to them. The school board was also relieved of any blame; although the board knew that fire-safe school building designs existed, they thought they had built a sound, safe structure (just as tens of thousands of school districts had done).

Janitor Fritz Hirter was absolved of any responsibility. During the inquest, witnesses told of how his 11-year-old son, Hughie, had raced into the fire several times to save other children and throw them from second-floor windows. Hughie could have saved himself many times, and chose not to.

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Collinwood tried to build a new school on the site of the old one. Local citizens were outraged. A year later, the state of Ohio purchased the land and the town erected a memorial garden and pond there. Collinwood Memorial School was built adjacent to the site. It had the highest standards of fire resistance at the time.

Nineteen bodies could not be identified. They and another 30 identifiable bodies were buried in a common grave in Lake View Cemetery.