Agnes Chapin

Agnes was one of eleven children born to Mary A. Stephenson and Seth Smith Chapin (1820-1910), an Episcopal minister. Seth was from Connecticut but raised his family in Port Huron, Michigan, where he lived most of his life, except a few years in Chicago just before the fire.

Seth had married Mary in 1876 after the death of the mother of his first eight children. Mary, twenty-six years younger, gave birth to three more of his children, including Agnes, and named her after Mary's mother, Agnes Catherine Hamilton Stephenson (1813-1879).

By 1903 Seth and Mary lived in Chicago, where at least four of his children had located. As an eighty-three-year-old, Seth worked as a helper and substitute for the rectors of the Grace and St. Paul's churches in Chicago, pitching in with early services, burials, and baptisms.

Under the same roof were Anna and William. Anna Rebecca Chapin (1863-1956) was Agnes's older half-sister. She taught at the Sherwood school for a $700 annual salary. Twenty-three-year-old William S. Chapin (1880-1940), a brother, was a clerk at the Barbour thread company. He identified Agnes's body.  She was buried in Mount Rest Cemetery in St. John's, Michigan on Sunday, January 3, 1904.

Agnes's grave marker was engraved 1904 rather than 1903, making me wonder if she survived in a hospital for a few days but her brother wired  Mary Williams on January 1, 1904 that they had found Agnes's body on December 31, 1903.  Possibly her marker was made/remade at a later time by a relative who chose to note the year of burial rather than of death.  I've seen it go both ways.  In a few cases, markers for victims who survived in a hospital for days or even weeks into 1904 were nonetheless inscribed 1903.

In the years after the fire

William Chapin married Alice Merrigan and spent most of his life in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan.

Edith Dickie

Twenty-six-year-old Ontario native Edith A. Dickie (b. 1876) lived at 619 W. 65th Place in Chicago. She taught at the Sherwood school* at the corner of 57th St. and Princeton.

Edith lived with her parents, Thomas and Ida Catherine Ballard Dickie, and three brothers, John, James, and Luke. The family had emigrated from Ontario in 1885. Edith and her brothers may have attended Sherwood school. Thomas Dickie worked as a clerk for the Milwaukee Road (Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway) at the Union Passenger station on Adams Street.

Edith had graduated from Englewood High School in 1894 and the Normal School the following year. She began working as a teacher in 1896 and attended the University of Chicago, taking classes in education in the summer of 1902. The university held a memorial service to honor Edith and eight other past and present U of C students who died at the Iroquois Theater.

Constructed in 1885 and named to honor Jesse Sherwood, the Sherwood school employed twenty-seven teachers in 1903. It had so many students that three more classrooms were carved from the third-floor assembly hall, bringing the total to eleven. (A twelve-room addition came in 1912.)

James H. Brayton, principal of the Raymond School, identified Edith's body.

Newspapers reported burial was at Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago. Though not confirmed by a photo of her gravestone, Mount Hope was also the burial site of her parents.

In the years after the fire

Four years later, at age sixty-one, Brayton committed suicide; his family reported that he was despondent over a lingering illness.

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Tyrone Essig

Seventeen-year-old Tyrone Essig (b. 1886) died at Chicago's Iroquois theater in 1903.  She was the daughter of Lee Henry Essig (1851-1923) and Amanda Elizabeth Primley Essig (1850-1920), named after Lee's half sister, Tyrone Allen.

Tyrone was home for the Christmas holiday when she went to the Mr. Bluebeard matinee with her French teacher, twenty-four-year-old Agnes Hamilton Chapin.  In her photo she appears to be what in 1903 might have been described as a saucy girl.  If she had some attitude, it may have been related to being a student at the Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a private school operated by the feisty aunts of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Ellen and Jane Jones.

Coincidentally, two of Frank Lloyd Wright's sons, eleven and thirteen year old John and Lloyd, escaped from the Iroquois Theater with their grandmother, Flora Tobin.

Lee and Amanda had lived in Burlington, Kansas when Tyrone was born, and for a short while in Amanda's hometown, Elkhart, Indiana, but by 1898 settled in Chicago.  Lee worked as a compounder at a chewing gum factory owned by Amanda's brother, Jonathan Philip Primley (1851-1914).  Primley was an Elkhart, Indiana drugstore retailer who in the mid 1880s partnered with Alfred Jones of Grand Rapids, Michigan to produce tonics and chewing gum.  The best known patent medicine brands of the Jones and Primley Company were Primley's Iron and Wahoo Tonic, Primley's Speedy Cure for Coughs and Colds and Jones Glycerine Arnica Salve.  Their chewing gum brands were California Fruit and Gold Box.

In 1891 Primley bought out Jones and moved the company to Chicago -- the same year that William Wrigley Jr brought his soap-making operation to Chicago and began using chewing gum to promote soap sales.  By 1899, Primley's company was one of nine in a trust of chewing gum manufacturers known as the American Chicle Company (that in 1914 would acquire Frank Fleers' candy-coated Chiclets. Chicle referred to the primary sap/rubber ingredient of both stick and candy coated chewing gum).  Primley sold his chewing gum holdings in 1899 and, with his brother, William Primley, founded Wisconsin Granite Company to produce paving blocks.

Amanda and Lee had lost their first child, two year old Elmer Essig, in 1889, and he was buried in the Essig family plot at Grace Lawn cemetery in Elkhart.  Tyrone joined him in 1904, Amanda in 1920 and Lee in 1923.  In another coincidence, Iroquois Theater manager Will J. Davis, is buried at the same cemetery, as well as the parents of another Iroquois Theater victim, Kathleen Middleton.  Though Amanda Primley was six years younger than Davis, it is almost certain the Primley and Davis families were acquainted in this city with a population in 1900 of around 15,000 where Amanda's father was a grocer and Davis's father owner of a dry goods store.

The five-hour train ride between Elkhart and Chicago did not prevent Tyrone and her cousin, Mabel Primley, from getting together occasionally.  The daughter of Tyrone's uncle Worthington Primley (1861-1929), Mabel and Tyrone were the same age. Sometimes Mabel traveled to Chicago but in July, 1903, Tyrone and her parents traveled to Elkhart to attend the funeral of Amanda's mother, Sarah Hitchner Primley (1821-1903).  Amanda's father, Jacob Primley, had died in 1875.  Worthington worked for one of Elkhart's musical instrument manufacturing companies.  Buried in Grace Lawn Cemetery with the Essigs and Will J. Davis is Charles Gerard Conn, pioneer band instrument manufacturer.

In Chicago, the Essig's lived at 239 West 66th street, site of Tyrone's funeral services the morning of January 2, 1904.  Upon returning to Elkhart around 1920, Lee and Amanda lived on Strong Avenue.   There were Essig families in Elkhart but I did not find evidence they were related to Lee, whose family was from Ohio.  The Elkhart connection was based on Amanda's family, the Primleys.

Ruth Margaret "Bonnie" Smith

Ruth Margaret Smith (b. 1888) was fifteen years old when she lost her life in the fire at the Iroquois Theater.  She was a girl of many names.  At home and with family she was Ruthie or Bonnie, while at school she was known by her middle name, Margaret.  Orphaned eighteen months before by the early deaths of her parents, Ohioans Edward Parker Smith (1844 - January, 1902), a traveling salesman, and Mary "Mollie" E. Studevant Smith (1845 - April, 1902), Ruth lived with her brother and guardian, Charles E. Smith (1880-c1945) at 2177 Washington Blvd.

In 1903 Charles worked as a clerk for Swift & Co. at the Chicago Stockyards while Ruth attended the John Marshall high school and college preparatory school on Chicago's west side at West Adams street and Kedzie avenue.  She was the only Iroquois Theater fire victim who attended Marshall.

In happier times, two years before death began stalking the family, Ruth, the baby in the family, lived with her parents and three siblings: Charles, an older, married sister, Katherine "Kittie" Smith Mentz (1874-1919) and the sibling closest to her in age, Leon H. Smith (1883-1905).

Funeral and interment

Ruth's body was found at Buffums Funeral Home and identified by her brother Charles.  The funeral was held the Saturday after the fire, January 4, 1904.  She was buried at the Benzonia Township Cemetery in Benzonia, Michigan, alongside her parents and paternal grandparents.

Benzonia and Congregational Church

Prior generations of Smiths hailed from Pennsylvania, one family member even fighting with George Washington at Valley Forge.  Some later settled in Richland, Ohio.  From there, Ruth's grandparents, Samuel Smith (1801-1875) and Mary Ann Soper Smith (1807-1894), retired to Benzonia, Michigan in the 1870s. The tiny religious colony on the east shore of Lake Michigan, about thirty miles southwest of Traverse City, had been founded a decade earlier.  A handful of Congregational faithful from Ohio were determined to establish a Congregational school patterned after Ohio's Oberlin College.  Grand Traverse College (later named Benzonia College), was the alma mater of the effort's founder, Charles E. Bailey.  Samuel Smith was a farmer with passions beyond sowing and harvesting crops.  Remembered in his obituary for his work on behalf of abolitionist and temperance causes, he and his family, including his father and siblings, helped found the Congregational church in Mansfield, Ohio.  His decision to spend his final years helping build a Congregational community in Michigan was in character.

In the years after the fire

Ruth's brother and guardian, Charles E. Smith, became an accountant.  In 1909 he married Mabel Forest Smith had two children. After a decade in Chicago the family moved east, first to New York then on to settle in Ridgewood, New Jersey.  He was the only one amongst the siblings, or parents, to reach his sixtieth birthday.  Kittie married, maybe twice, but died young, without producing offspring.  The youngest brother, Leon, died two years after Ruth, at age twenty-two.

Discrepancies and addendum

*Mary Williams was also a teacher at Washington Grammar School on Court St.  She was the daughter of John and Caroline Warren Williams.

† Not to be confused with the Sherwood Music School on South Michigan Ave.

Story 2966