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On December 30, 1903, twenty-three-year-old Farragut elementary
school* teacher Ella Lawrence (b. 1880) attended an afternoon
matinee at Chicago's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater. She and an
unidentified friend sat in the dress circle in the second-floor
balcony. Setting off her blonde hair and fit 5'5"
130-pound figure was a red silk blouse, black walking skirt and
small opal ring.
After three days of searching, friends found her body at Rolston's Undertaking,
She and her companion were among nearly six hundred victims of
America's worst theater fire, of which
forty-one were school teachers.
Ella's body was identified by A. F.
or H. J. Schroeder and Henry Tibbits, principal
at the Clark School.
A Tennessee native, Ella Alma
Warley / Lawrence may have been raised by printer
Frank J. Warley (1857-1882) and Gertrude Hawkins
Warley (1857-___) of England. At the time of the Iroquois fire, Ella
boarded at 917-922 South Sawyer Avenue with
Kentuckians William Lawrence (18??-1908) and Martha
Watkins Lawrence ( 1836-1918). They might have
been her grandparents, or an aunt and uncle.
Ella had graduated from the Joseph Medill High School in
Chicago in 1899 and gone on to the Normal School for
teacher training. Her first cadet assignments were in
Aurora, Illinois and at the Wentworth and Garfield schools in
Chicago. She joined the Farragut staff in
September 1903.
She was buried at the Graceland Cemetery in Chicago
where William and Martha Lawrence followed a few years later. A
year after the fire, a $10,000 wrongful death suit
was filed on her behalf The newspaper
miss-reported her middle/maiden name as "Willy"
rather than Warley.
Discrepancies and addendum
* Another teacher at the Farragut school,
Mary "Adella" Strawbridge, also died at the Iroquois Theater,
but she and Ella did not attend the theater together.
Ella and Mary were two of thirty teachers at the Farragut school in 1903,
supervised by principal Mary E. Baker.
Farragut (today a high school, grades nine to twelve) was
located at Spaulding Avenue and 23rd Street.
Constructed in 1894, the school was nine years old
then, with 1,438 students — 310 more students than
there were seats. Three new schools were being
constructed to relieve the situation and a portable
building was ordered as a temporary solution.
Nice assemblage of information about Farragut school
on Wikipedia.
18 year old Henrietta
Christian died at the Iroquois
Florence Tobias taught at
Jefferson Elementary
Beders lost daughters and
grandchildren
Other discussions you might find interesting
irqnocompanions
Story 1166
A note about sourcing. When this
project began, I failed to anticipate the day might come when a
more scholarly approach would be called for. When my
mistake was recognized I faced a decision: go back and spend years creating source lists for every page, or go
forward and try to cover more of the people and circumstances
involved in the disaster. Were I twenty years younger, I'd
have gone back, but in recognition that this project will end when I do, I chose to go forward.
These pages will provide enough information, it is hoped, to
provide subsequent researchers with additional information.
I would like to
hear from you if you have additional info about an Iroquois victim, or find an error,
and you're invited to visit the
comments page to share stories and observations about the Iroquois Theater fire.
