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On December 30, 1903, thirty-six-year-old Mary Holst took
her three children, aged seven to twelve, to see Mr.
Bluebeard at
the Iroquois Theater. They were seated in the
third-floor balcony. When a stage fire spread to the
auditorium, she and the three children were among the nearly six hundred who perished
in America's worst theater fire.
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William Holst found and identified his family
members at Rolston's and Jordan's mortuaries.
The Holst family is buried at Forest Home Cemetery
in Forest Park, Illinois. See discussion below about
their church and funerals.
Holst family bio
William Martin Holst (1866–1934) and Mary Mae Ward
Holst (b.1867) and their children, Alan B. Holst
(b.1891), Gertrude F. Holst (b. 1893), and Amy W.
Holst (b. 1896), were all born in Illinois. William
and Mary Holst were married in 1890.
William worked as a stationary
engineer. In 1903 the family lived at 2088 W. Van
Buren St. in Chicago.
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All three Holst children
attended the Charles Sumner elementary school. The
sixteen-room Sumner Grammar School on West
Forty-third and Harrison was opened in 1894.
There were twenty-two students in the first
graduating class in 1895.
Other Iroquois victims that attended the Sumner school were
Edith Mahler and
Arlene Schreiner.
In the years after the fire
In 1909 William Holst received $750 settlements for
Mary's, Gertrude's, Amy's and Alan's deaths from
Fuller Construction, the company that built the
Iroquois Theater. Those settlements were four of
only thirty-five paid out for Iroquois Theater
lives.
Sometime after 1910, William married Catherine Ebben
(1889–1972), and they had two daughters, Catherine
Beatrice and Wilma, in addition to Elizabeth, who at
age seventeen worked as a bookkeeper. He continued
to work as a mechanical engineer, for the Board of
Education, in 1907 assigned to the Sumner School.
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Episcopalian? Presbyterian? Catholic?
In his memoirs,
Pastor John Hopkins wrote
that Alan Holst was a choir boy at Episcopal
Church of the Epiphany on S. Ashland but the
error-laden period book by Marshall
Everett, Chicago's
Awful Theater Horror,
offers a picture of a sad scene of the Holst
family's funeral at a frame church at
Congress St. and 42nd avenue, the address of
the Calvary Presbyterian church. In Pastor
Hopkins recollection and/or memories, the
family name was misspelled as "Hoist."
Scheduling conflicts with other Iroquois
victims may have led William Holst to have
services at a different church, or Hopkins
memory could be in error, but another
possible discrepancy about the Holsts in the
Everett book cause me to wonder if Everette
confused the Holsts with an altogether
different family.
The Everette book also has William Holst at
the theater with his wife and children and
escaping, a six-month-old son in his arms,
while his wife and other three children
tried to reach a fire escape exit. Poignant
but untrue. According to a descendent,
William did not attend the theater; he
remained home with a fourth Holst child. It
was not a son, however, and not six months
old. Elizabeth, born in July, 1902, was
eighteen months old.
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