Enlarge to read John's description
of his Iroquois Theater experience

During a performance of Mr. Bluebeard at Chicago's new Iroquois Theater on December 30, 1903, a stage fire spread to the auditorium. Within twenty minutes nearly six hundred people died. Among the survivors was a party of four made up of a Welsh immigrant named John Griffith and his three unidentified companions, another man and two women (one of whom was probably Emma Miller who would become Griffith's wife four months later). The foursome had left the auditorium during the intermission prior to Act II and was a bit late in returning to their seats at the front of the second-floor balcony. When they heard outcries of, "Fire!" Griffith insisted they evacuate immediately and they became members of a group of approximately one-hundred-seventy survivors from that balcony.
In his interview with Kansas newspapers (above) Griffith referenced two events in the disaster that would soon be dismissed by dozens of witnesses in legal investigations: 1.) a gas explosion and 2.) an aerialist wire blocking the fire curtain's descent. By John's own description his party left the auditorium before either supposed event took place, so his only knowledge was third-hand, from casual conversation and/or published interviews in day-after newspapers.^▼1

From Wales to Iowa to Kansas

Welshman John Griffith (1861–1926^▼2) was an engineer on the Santa Fe Railroad ,living in Emporia, Kansas, widowed for eight years and living with five of his eight children. Though he was recorded as being married in the 1900 U.S. Census, his wife Mary Owens, also a native of Wales, had died of breast cancer in 1895. They had married in 1874, lived in Iowa for a time, then in 1893 settled in Emporia, Kansas.

There was a sizeable community of Welsh immigrants in Emporia, seven hundred recorded in 1870 when the first ATSF train pulled into town and growing to a Welsh farming community of around ten thousand.^▼3

Roughly twenty-five thousand people live in today's Emporia, 5X what it was when John and his first wife lived there. It was a railroad crossroads then, a recognized railroad town, and John's employer, the Atchison, Topeka Santa Fe railroad, was a prominent force in Emporia's economy. Today Emporia is better recognized as a hub for disc golf with over ten parks that offer disc courses. Retail shops and tournaments cater to dis golf enthusiasts.

By 1903 John changed homes and was living at 327 Constitution Ave in Emporia (today the site of a Salvation Army).

In the years after the fire

Four months after the Iroquois Theater fire he married a widow from Canada, dressmaker Emma Elizabeth Miller (1860–1937),^▼4 a woman who lived in Chicago in 1903 but had lived in Emporia during her childhood and first marriage., at least until 1900. I looked at Emma's many sisters, and John's children hoping to guess the identities of the other couple in the Iroquois theater party. One of her sisters could have been visiting the U.S., but I didn't see any that relocated to Chicago. Another possibility is that it was one of the couples mentioned in their nuptials (Swanstrom, Romaine, Dyne, Smith, Leonard or Pinch); if so nothing was published linking their names to the Iroquois disaster.

By 1910 John and Emma were living in Chicago where they remained for the rest of their lives, letting out rooms to a few lodgers while John worked as a security guard.

Emma and John are buried next to one another at Mount Greenwood in unmarked graves.

Discrepancies and addendum

1. John was not alone in echoing erroneous newspaper coverage. When the multi-ton loft crashed to the stage floor it shook nearby structures and made an "explosive" sound that morphed into an explosion with retelling. The same was true of the aerialist wire. There was an aerialist's suspension wire laying on the stage floor but it did not come in contact with the fire curtain. The fire curtain caught up on a vertical lamp strip on the north side of the proscenium arch. Scores of witnesses described seeing stage workers struggling to unsnarl the curtain from the lamp strip before flames and smoke drove them to evacuate the building, and a half dozen stage workers testified about that struggle.
Rumors abound in all disasters. The quantity of vulnerable victims at the Iroquois, combined with titillation, produced intense public interest and drove newspaper publishers to print everything and anything. To their credit, Chicago newspapers gave nearly as many column inches to witness testimony in fire department and coroner's office inquests as they'd given to victims. Those news stories throughout January and February 1904 corrected the worst inaccuracies. Unfortunately, those reports did not begin to appear until nearly a week after the fire, by which time dozens, maybe hundreds of newspapers had spread bad information — that as I type is probably being repeated in some blog, news story or term paper.


2. Despite spending rather a lot of time looking for solid information, I offer John's middle initial and date of birth with big maybes.
-- In the 1900 U.S. Census the enumerator's handwriting makes his middle initial look mostly like a J but it could also be a, G, F, or S.
-- When he purchased the marriage license in 1904 it was reported in the newspaper legal notice as a G.
-- In an announcement of his 1904 marriage to Emma Miller it was reported in the newspaper as F.

For his birth/death years I'm going with the dates his widow provided Mount Greenwood Cemetery at his death — although even Emma was iffy on the 1861 birth year, tagging it as an estimate. My gut tells me he was older than that, in part because Kansas newspaper stories about John's Iroquois experience described him as "an elderly man," an unlikely description for a forty-two-year old. The average life expectancy then was only forty-seven, however, so maybe he did look relatively old.

Some examples of why his birth year is a shaky as jello:
-- On their marriage license application John gave his age as forty-eight, making his year of birth 1855.
-- He, or someone in the household, told the 1900 U.S. Census enumerator that he was born in 1845 but gave his age as forty-four, a ten-year discrepancy.
-- In the same Census report was recorded that he immigrated in 1862 at age thirty-eight – making his birth year 1824. By the 1920s he'd claim to have immigrated in 1879.
In the 1880 census his math was at least correct; he reported that his birth year was around 1850 and his age in 1880 was thirty. My guess is that he didn't know his year of birth and was seriously bad at math, though he reported that he could read and write.

3. Poor crop yields in Europe coincided with heavy promotion by U.S. land speculators who held large quantities of land adjacent to railroads. (Kansas had granted three million acres to the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe railroad in exchange for ATSF's commitment to build a rail line across the state by 1873.) As is oftentimes the case in go-go markets, the reality didn't always live up to the hype. Land wasn't always as fertile and prices not always as cheap as promised in advertisements. Nonetheless, enough Welsh families stayed and prospered that Emporia's population grew from two thousand in 1870 to eight thousand in 1900.

4. Emma's first husband had died in 1893.

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