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Despite being listed as a fatality in some early
victim lists, John J. Weber (1854–1912) escaped the
Iroquois Theater. For the next nine years until his
death, he had to live with knowing that while he
survived, his wife of twenty-five years did not.
Hours later, he identified Carrie's body.
Caroline "Carrie" (b. 1854) was forty-nine years
old. Her maiden name was Weber, too. Married
in 1878, the same year he started his hackney-coach
company, John and Carrie were the parents of two
children. In 1903 Martha "Mattie" Weber (1879–1963)
was twenty-four, and Harold Weber (1890–1907) was
twelve.
John Weber was a founder and co-owner of Weber &
Bayha, a company at 166 Chicago Avenue in Chicago
that from 1878 to 1912 provided horse-drawn bus
service between the
Chicago Northwestern train depot at the corner of Wells and
Kinzie and State street area department stores.* His partner,
David Bayha, was his brother-in-law, married to
Carrie's sister, Lucy. Another brother-in-law,
Richard W. Glasebrook, married to her sister Anna,
was a manager at the firm. The business provided a
good income, enabling John and Carrie to purchase
their home at 402 Garfield in Chicago and to employ
a full-time domestic servant.
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Born in 1854, Carrie grew up
in Wheeling, Illinois, one of a herd of daughters
born to European immigrants, Frank and Catherine
Weber. Frank and five of Carrie's siblings were
still living at the time of her death, several of
whom lived in Chicago and would have been able to
attend her funeral.
In the years after the fire
John Weber remarried
in 1905 to a native of England named Irene, surname
not yet known. It was her second marriage. She had
born a child, presumably by the first marriage, that
was still living in 1910 but did not live with Irene
and John.
Carrie and John's son,
Harold Weber, died at age seventeen, four years
after the fire. Daughter Mattie married, divorced,
and remarried.
The last Weber & Bayha bus ran in January 1912, and
John Weber died four months later. Before his death,
he relocated to Ludington, Michigan, to operate a
fruit farm. He was buried alongside Carrie at
Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.
In a strange coincidence, in 1932, Carrie's sister,
Lucy Bayha, by then a seventy-seven-year-old widow,
died from burns received in a home fire.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Travel literature of the
time referenced popular Chicago shopping
destinations as including Marshall Fields, Siegel
Cooper Company, Rothschild's, Mandel's, The Fair,
Carson Pirie Scott, and The Boston Store. Weber and
Bayha's four horse-drawn carriage buses were
replaced on January 28, 1912, with four "electric
motor buses."
In the early 1900s, there
was an actress named Carrie Weber and a Chicago
actor named John Weber. Different folks
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