Howard Williams  was a seventeen-year-old Cornell University student, home for the Christmas holidays. He had purchased tickets for another show but, at the last minute, changed his mind and went to Mr. Bluebeard at the Iroquois Theater.  He and his girlfriend (name not yet found) sat in the balcony.

Williams had attended the Lewis Institute in 1902 and was expected to graduate from Cornel in 1906 with a BA. He was on the basketball and track teams.

His body was found at Rolston's mortuary.  His friend and fellow Cornell student, twenty-year-old Edward Johnson Blair (1883-1973),* Blair's father, George Peters Blair (1854-1938), and John Henry Hopkins, minister at the Church of the Epiphany† attended by the Blair and Williams families, spent the morning after the fire searching morgues.  I don't know if Howard's father or half brother was also involved in the search.

In the years after the Iroquois Theater fire, Howard's mother compiled a scrapbook of his childhood artwork, offering a glimpse at her son as a boy.

In his book about his wife and memoirs, The Life of Marie Moulton Graves Hopkins, Beloved Wife of John Henry Hopkins And The Story of Their Life and Work Together, Hopkins wrote that he would never forget the experience.

Five other other members of his parishioners were also Iroquois Theater victims, including, Mary Holst and her three children, and Gertrude Fitzpatrick (though one source placed the Holst family services at a Presbyterian church).

In addition to mutual membership in the Church of the Epiphany and Cornell University, Howard Williams and Edward Blair (Cornell class of 1905, M.E.) both attended Lewis Institute for their undergraduate education before going on to Cornell.  The Lewis Institute, founded in 1895, offered liberal arts, science, and engineering courses. In 1940 it and the Armour Institute of Technology were merged to form today's Illinois Institute of Technology.

Howard's funeral was held at the family home at 213 South Leavitt St. in Chicago on Saturday, on Jan 2 1904, at 8:00 a.m.

Williams family bio

Howard John Williams (b.1886) was the youngest of two children born to John Howard Williams (1836-1914) and Inez Fulmer Williams (1863-1928). Howard's younger sister, Margaret Williams (1893-), was six years old at the time of the fire. John Williams was a principal of the Washington Ice Company in Chicago (see below). Inez was John's second wife, married in 1885. With his first wife, Miriam Lucy Kingsbury (1840-1882), he had a son, named Charles K. Williams (1877-1933) and a daughter, Cherry Ellen Williams (1866-1945). John was born in Maine, Inez in Wisconsin and all his children in Illinois.

In the eleven years after the Iroquois fire, Howard's mother, Inez Fulmer Williams, would lose three of her six siblings, as well as her husband.

John Williams' company, the Washington Ice Company, had been prosperous enough that they owned their home on South Leavett and in 1900 retained a teenaged live-in house servant, Ruth Jeffrey (1886-).  He was one of three principals when the company was incorporated in December of 1877, capitalized with $250,000.  His partners were Walhams and M. S. Thompson.

Washington Ice Company

Ice companies harvested ice from rivers and lakes, hauling it by steamboats for storage in ice houses. Chicago's demand for ice gave rise to twenty-two ice companies, employing 7,000 workers in 1900. John William's Washington Ice Company was the largest of those.  It is interesting to read newspaper stories from the 1870s-1900s and see ice described as a crop to be harvested, its availabilities and prices subject to climate changes, much as corn or bean crops are today.

Warm winters in the mid-1890s reduced the supply of ice.  Companies had to travel as far north as Green Bay, Wisconsin, then haul it south to Chicago, thereby increasing their costs.  When they raised prices to accommodate increased costs, they were demonized.

In Chicago, rate increases were 40% -- from $.15 cents a week to $.25 a week (inflation-adjustment: $4.30-$7.30).  In Manhattan, prices doubled. In both cities, price increases brought accusations from a trust-averse populace that ice companies were colluding. John Williams was one of the Chicago ice company representatives who spoke up and tried to explain the economics behind the price increases.
In 1898, rumors of a Chicago ice trust became fact.  Thirty "natural" ice companies‡ merged under the Knickerbocker name.

Knickerbocker II was capitalized with $5 million and included million in 2,300 acres of real estate and ice privileges, 122 ice houses in three states, 1.5 million tons of inventoried ice, 1,200 horses, 800 wagons, 200 railroad cars, 35 miles of railroad switch tracks, etc.

John Williams became secretary of the new entity, receiving stocks and bonds in the new company.

In the book, Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life,§  author Perry Duis offers an interesting discussion of the collision that took place in the 1920s between ice companies, technology and ramped up consumer expectations.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Not to be confused with Clyde Blair, also a university student and an athlete, who survived the Iroquois Theater fire.

† Closed in 2011 after the congregation shrank to six people.

‡ As opposed to chemically-made "artificial ice," that had begun demonstrating it was more than a pricey novelty.

§ found a used copy on Ebay for under $5.

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