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Grace Mae Suiter Bartine (1875–1914) was married to
Charles Willett Bartine (1868–1944), a former school
principal and teacher at the South Belvidere High
School in Belvidere Illinois, northwest of Chicago.
She was an Iowa girl, born to lifelong Mississippi
river pilot Captain Zachariah Zach G. Suiter and
Angeline Angie David Suiter (1851–1934). A
Philadelphia native, Angie had come west with her
parents as a toddler and married Zachary in 1873.
She was one of six children, of which four lived to adulthood. In 1903 she
and her father lived in Le Claire, Iowa,* a city then of
only a thousand people but one of the quad cities
with Davenport, Rock Island, and Moline.
On December 30, 1903, Angie and Grace had traveled
west to Chicago, staying at 5703 Drexel Blvd. As a
soloist in her Methodist church choirs and frequent
vocalist in amateur productions by her Belvidere
social clubs, Grace was probably looking forward to
a big city musical. When the pair left home that
morning, they planned to attend Mr. Bluebeard
but there were no seats remaining, so they walked
down the street to the
Garrick and went to The Pit.
To prevent panic, Garrick manager Brady prevented
his audience from leaving the auditorium and
learning about the Iroquois fire until the
conclusion of the performance. That was when Angie
and Grace discovered their streetcar was blocked,
delaying their return home. Charles Bartine,
however, assumed the delay meant they were lost in
the fire, so he reported their names to authorities
as missing.
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Their names appeared in lists
of the missing on 12/31/1903 newspapers and in
1/1/04 newspapers that Grace, though injured, was
safe. How the newspaper got the story about injury
to a woman, not at the Iroquois is unknown.
Also unknown is who the women were visiting on Drexel
Blvd. In 1902 Charles, known in Belvidere as Professor Bartine,
had run into problems with anger management and a bad-mannered
student that resulted in lawyers, the Belvidere
school board, threats of litigation, and
burg-rocking controversy. After a special meeting of
the school board with Charles and the boy's father,
the board's official decision was to take no action,
but the incident may have presaged the end of his
teaching career. By 1907 he and Grace were living in
Chicago and may already have been living there in
December 1903.
In the years after the fire
Heart disease took Zach Suiter in 1907, but he lived long enough to
know Grace's two children, Elmer and Eloise. Charles
Bartine got a law degree in 1905. Around 1910 he and
Grace Bartine's relocated to South Dakota, where
Charles worked as a real estate attorney in practice
with his brother, John Bartine. Grace died from
pneumonia in 1914, while her mother and brother
rushed to be by her side. Charles remarried Isabel
Kern and returned to Iowa. Angie Suiter would live
with her grandchildren in Davenport, IA, for the
last four years of her life.
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