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Escape
The section of stairs from the western-most fire
escape on the second floor at the Iroquois was
designed to be raised so that wide vehicles could
pass through Couch Place Alley. The
section was
probably left in the raised position most of the
time but that meant that on December 30, 1903, with
near-zero temperatures in Chicago, the mechanism to
release the stairs was frozen and initially the stairs could
not be lowered to the ground.
Volunteer rescuers eventually
freed the stairs and they were lowered but the first
people existing through
door #29 found themselves on a platform twenty
feet off the ground. Some had no choice but to
jump off or be pushed off by the throng of people behind
them pouring through the door.
That was the exit
platform from which curtain man
Joe Dougherty
jumped and broke his leg. It was also the platform
from which Blanch Nelms was
knocked to the alley below. When she realized
there were no stairs she tried to go back inside the
theater but the pushing from other people trying to
get the door prevented it.
It was the only fire escape exit on the second floor
for which the doors were opened.
It got worse
Blanche was first taken to Samaritan hospital
but when physicians knew they could not help
her, she was released to her family to take her
home to 5145 Prairie St.
She lived for
ten days after the fire, usually unconscious but
sometimes waking to excruciating pain and
hallucinating that she was still at the Iroquois
and surrounded by flames.
Her family reported that in addition to respiratory
injuries, Blanche suffered severe burns that left
her disfigured and scarred.
Her husband by her side, Blanche was coherent
enough during her last days, to tell her family that she
had tried to
shield her face from the flames with her hat and
that when she reached the fire escape platform and
the stairs were not working, she tried to go back
inside the auditorium but the pressing crowds pushed
her back and off the platform..* One
newspaper reported that she was knocked down
five times before falling from the landing.
Blanche died early Saturday morning, January 9,
1904†. As required by statute, the
coroner's jury were driven to either her home or
a morgue to view her body and verify the death.
She was victim #569.
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Bio
Blanche May Cornell Nelms (b.1876) and her husband, thirty-one-year-old
Louis A. Nelms ( b.1872), had married in 1899
(though they reported 1897 on the 1900 U.S.
Census). She grew
up in Athens, Ohio, the daughter of New Jersey
native, Cheretta Martin Cornell (1849-1926), and the
late Ezra Cornell (1845-1893). Blanche had at least
one sibling, a brother named Pearly. In 1903 her
mother, Cheretta, lived with Blanche and Louis at
5145 Prairie Ave. in Chicago.‡
Louis Nelms was a traveling salesman for a mail-order butcher supply
wholesaler, Born Packer's Supply Company,
associated with Cincinnati Butchers
Supply. (His boss, Henry A. Born, must have been a colorful character.
He so offended Chicago Telephone operators with his
"vile, profane and abusive" language that his
service was cut off and it took a court order to get
it turned back on.) In the decades after the
Iroquois fire, Louis became an officer in Born's
company. I lost track of him soon after
1903. There is an outside chance he married
Pearl Shay, became a theater manager/producer in
Manhattan and died in 1933.
In the years after the fire
Blanche's funeral was held at a Methodist church in her hometown, Athens,
Ohio, and she was buried there at the West Union
Street Cemetery. The service was conducted
by Reverend W. L. Slutz
After her daughter's death, Cheretta worked for a time as a cook in the
Athens State Hospital.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* One newspaper story, by the Inter Ocean,
omitted Blanche's fall from the landing and
reported she'd been trampled and become
unconscious, then burned. The
Chicago Tribune report is in better
alignment with circumstances of the fire.
Some newspaper reports said she was knocked
from the landing while others said she
jumped.
† The Illinois Death Index reports the date
of death as January 8, 1904 but 1/10/1904
newspapers reported it as having occurred
January 9, 1904. The Inter Ocean
varied from other newspapers on this point,
too, reporting that she died on the 8th, but
in the hospital, rather than at home as
reported elsewhere.
‡ Because Blanche died so long after other
victims, her passing received a
disproportionate number of newspaper column
inches. It is interesting that in so
much exposure, newspapers did not identify
her theater companions. That makes me
suspect the omission was intentional,
perhaps her family's wish to protect someone
who felt guilty to have survived. Her
mother Cheretta seems a likely candidate.
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