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Thirty-nine-year-old Ragna Olarsen Anderson*
was said to live at 229 Grand Avenue and worked at the
Iroquois Theater. At the Iroquois she may have
cleaned restrooms or performed more back-breaking
work such as mopping the theater's white marble floors and stairs. No
small task when winter precipitation got together
with 1903 coal smog. Even the least expensive ticket for a standing space would
have cost about a third of Ragna's pay for the day
so she may have gotten a free pass for Carrie's
standing space in the third-floor balcony.
A Carrie B. Anderson (1890-1969)
lived at 352 W. Erie with her father, grandparents
and older sister. They were Theodore and Ida
Anderson , Albert Anderson* and Ida Caroline
Anderson. If Perhaps Ragna was working as a
domestic servant and living in her employer's home
in 1900? How many Carrie Andersons living on
Erie could there have been in Chicago?! Well
perhaps many. The name Anderson was beyond
common.
Ragna would probably have run north on the promenade
toward the auditorium, intending to find Carrie in
the balcony. She may even have passed the group
that included James Strong and his family on their
way to the fateful
utility stairwell. Ironically, Ragna may have carried a passkey that could have
opened the locked door at the bottom of the utility
stairwell and freed the twenty-five or so people trapped
there.
Exits to/from the auditorium became impassible soon
after the start of the fire, along with the
stairways leading from them to the lobby. Ragna may have become ensnared in
one of the struggling groups of people on the stairs
as she fought to get to the entrance to the balcony
to find her daughter or, if she got inside the
auditorium, been unable to find Carrie amidst 540
people..
Meanwhile, daughter Carrie was
out on the fire escape platform, crawling across a
plank to Northwestern, urging others to follow her
lead.
Workmen ran ladders and planks over to the fire
escape, saving around a dozen people.
Did Carrie walk across or crawl, across the plank, I wonder? Crawling
in a floor-length dress would require bunching the
dress up around the hips and keeping it there, not
an easy task when on hands and knees. If the
skirt slipped below her knees, crawling forward
would have quickly become all but impossible.
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If she leaned all her weight on one arm so as to use
the other hand to pull the dress back up and out of
the way, the plank might have tipped and she would
have fallen. On the other hand, if she crossed
standing upright, balancing might have been made doubly
difficult by that same dress becoming like a sail.
One of the plank girl heroes
Carrie was
one of four girls credited with having steadied the
first plank but probably they each steadied
different planks at different points. The
workmen put out several planks and any given plank
would have needed to be readjusted as people climbed
up on it from the landing. The heroic plank
girl controversy appears to have been the Inter
Ocean ginning up readership.
Stories of flames licking out
the fire escape door and burning Carrie before she
started across were probably true because she spent
the next forty-four days at the Samaritan hospital
recovering from her injuries, including burns and a
broken arm. The hospital released Carrie in time to testify at the grand
jury proceeding but reportedly she did not yet know her
mother was dead. She was
taken home after a brief testimony to be told the truth about her
mother.†
It seems odd that Carrie
accepted an excuse about her mother not visiting
during the girl's forty-day hospital stay but Ragna
did not live with her daughters and maybe saw them infrequently
under the best of circumstances. I failed to find
confirmation that Ragna and Albert Anderson were
married, or divorced. In general, I wore out the web trying to learn more
about Ragna or Ragne Anderson. According to the 1900
U.S. Census there were twenty-five women by that name living in the
United States, none in Chicago, and none in 1903
Chicago city directories. If I'd been making a
bet before beginning I would have thought the name
Ragna/Ragne was uncommon enough to offset the number
of Andersons. Not so.
In the years after the fire
Five months after the fire a
benefit choral performance at the Vendome Hotel by
the Amabilita Club for Carrie's education
accumulated $697 on her behalf (over $18,000 in
today's dollars). It was at that time reported
that she was living with her grandfather at 392 W.
Erie, naming him as Alexander
Anderson, not Theodore.‡
Further education must not
have worked out for Carrie. At age 20 she
still lived with her grandparents, working as a
sales clerk in a dry goods store. She may have
been engaged in assembly work a decade later.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Ragna's name sometimes appeared in newspapers as Ragne but
Ragna was used on official documents so is probably
accurate. Daughter Carrie's age was sometimes
reported as thirteen and fourteen. There is
some evidence that Ragna's husband was an Axel
rather than an Albert, and that he died in 1894.
It is contradicted by the 1900 U.S. Census that
reports Albert, Ida and Carrie living with a married
father named Albert but without a mother.
†
Withholding news of the death of a loved one at the
Iroquois was common. A bit of research
reveals that medicine and bereavement ritual was in
transition in 1903. Doctors knew grief was not
an instant killer, as had been thought a few decades
earlier (and was still believed by a substantial
segment of the public, if newspaper headlines are
any indication). Observations about the
capacity of grief to worsen the health of the aged
or ill, such as Carrie, were described in science
magazines. Awareness was sufficient that care
was taken to break bad news carefully, by a
selected relative or friend. Still, it
seems unlikely that the news came as a surprise to
Carrie. She has to have suspected something
was amiss when her mother did not come to her
bedside for over a month.
‡ The only Anderson in
1904 city directories at that address was Theodore
Anderson, who may have been Carrie"s grandfather.
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