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Sometimes people are surprised to learn that in terms of fatalities,
the Great Chicago fire with around three hundred victims was far surpassed by the nearly six hundred lost lives in
another Chicago fire thirty-two years later that remains today America's worst theater disaster.
The Iroquois Theater was brand new, completed just five weeks before the
matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard on the afternoon of December 30, 1903. Christmas was past
and school would resume in a few days. The auditorium was filled with students, teachers and holiday
visitors in the city for reunions, honeymoons, anniversaries and the like.
When a small fire erupted high up in the stage curtains, there was no
equipment with which to contain it. The flames soon engulfed the loft above the stage where hung hundreds
of fabric scenery backdrops. As performers fled for their lives through a large utility door at the rear
of the stage, blasts of cold winter entered the inferno and produced a back draft that in minutes hurled a wave
of fire into the auditorium and up into the balconies. When it hit at 3:50 pm watchworks were melted,
forever capturing the precise time of death for the hundreds who had not yet escaped from the auditorium.
Indiana natives, fifty-one-year-old Frances Ann Maddox Leach (b. 1853) and
her only child, Estella "Stella" Leach McCaslin (1873–1938),* were seated in the third-floor balcony.
Estella escaped with slight facial burns; her mother did not. Stella's account of her experience appears below.
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Upon learning of the Iroquois fire a large group of Frances's siblings gathered at the Wayne
Hotel in Fort Wayne, and set out for Chicago to help Estella find
her mother's body. After a three-day search in morgues and hospitals,
Frances was found at the Cook County morgue where she'd been recorded as
body #7. Her brothers, William M. Maddox and Dr. Leander E. Maddox, identified her body by a
Montpelier merchant's name on her shoe lining, a lock of hair, and her teeth. Her $50 emergency fund
was still tucked in her stockings. It was published that she probably died of suffocation rather
than burns. That means she was trampled beyond recognition else identification wouldn't have depended on clothing, hair and teeth.
Frances was buried January 5, 1904, at Woodlawn Cemetery in Montpelier, IN.
Frances's bio
Frances Ann Maddox Leach was one of eight children born to Wesley Harvey Maddox and Eliza Ann Grove. Her
husband George Woodward Leach (1852–1873) died around eighteen months after their wedding, and Frances did not
remarry. In 1900 and 1901, Frances lived with her daughter and son-in-law, Estelle and John W. McCaslin (1870–), at 5747
Drexel in Chicago. John worked as a penmanship
instructor in a business college. By 1903 Frances had moved back to her hometown in Montpelier, a small town midway between
Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana.
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In the years after the fire
Estella divorced John McCaslin for infidelity nine months after the fire but would marry twice more — to Benjamin Melton, with whom she shared a son, and to
William Thornburg. In the 1920s, she lived in Harrison, Indiana, on the Indiana, Kentucky border, but by 1930 was living in the Montpelier area where she'd
grown up. As an accomplished elocution performer, Stella operated the Stella
Leach McCaslin Opera Company, performing in churches and recital halls. In
addition to Stella, the company included a soprano singer, pianist-violinist,
and a whistler.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* Alternate spellings: Estella, Estelle, McCaslin,
McCasslin, McCasland and McCassland.
† Frances's siblings: Wesley Harvey Maddox II,
Joseph Collins Grove Maddox, Dr. Leander Erastus
Maddox, William McKendree "Ken" Maddox, Sarah Ellen
"Sadie" Maddox Shields of Montpelier, Laura Belle
Maddox Markley of Keystone
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