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Thirty-five-year-old Flossie Mueller and
her two young daughters, Florence and
Barbarabelle,▼1 were
seated at the back of the parquet on the ground
floor at the Iroquois Theater on
December 30, 1903. The threesome was
returning from the ladies room when the
fire broke out. In the reflection
on the glass-paned doors leading into
the auditorium, Flossie saw flames, and
abruptly headed her brood toward the
lobby where they were among the first to
reach the wall of doors there that lead
into the foyer.
Nearly six hundred
people died at the 1903 Iroquois Theater
that day. Of those all but a
handful died in the balconies where they were trapped
when at
3:50 P.M. a backdraft blasted
the stage fire out into the auditorium
and up into the balconies, drawn by
vents in the east wall and opened fire
escape doors on the north wall.
With ample time to evacuate through
three fire escape doors and three doors
to the lobby, only a handful of people seated on the first floor
lost their lives but at the time, of
course, they couldn't know that.
For Flossie Mueller, who heard screams
coming from the auditorium, death was
seconds away from her children and she
fought to protect them.
Flossie tried several
of the glass-paned doors in the lobby
(doors
10, 13 & 16) and upon finding
them locked, frantically threw herself at them.
She could see the
sidewalk in front of the building and
almost taste safety, but couldn't reach
it. Other audience members and passers
by quickly broke out the glass and
kicked open the doors. Had the Mueller
family been there five minutes earlier
or later, they could have walked out
without incident. Instead
five-year-old Florence
received a cut on the head when she was picked up
by a well-meaning stranger and thrown
over the heads of the crowd and out
onto the sidewalk. Flossie fainted
and her face was stepped on, while
seven-year-old Barbarabell walked through a different door
without difficulty. That was one
version of their escape anyway.▼2
Flossie was later interviewed at
the Samaritan Hospital▼3
where she was take for examination of
bruises to her face and eyes. She
reported that a restroom matron at the
theater had refused to give them their
coats. Granted it was freezing
outside but if an inferno was building
at my back, I wouldn't take time for
coats. Just sayin.
William F. Mueller
(1869–1937) and Florence "Flossie" Payne Mueller (1868–1939) had
married in 1894, both coming from well-to-do
families. William's father had founded a
telephone pole business in the Michigan's Upper
Peninsula in 1862▼4 and Florence's father had previously owned
livery stable/cab companies in Bloomington, IL and
Chicago. He
speculated on unimproved land in 1893 and was
rumored to be a millionaire, but lost
everything in the
financial panic of 1893.
The family lived in William's boyhood home at 3118
Calumet. Living there
In addition to Barbarabell and Florence, were two
younger children, Frederick and Minnie, and
Flossie's parents, Leroy and Cordelia O'Connor Payne.
Unknown to Flossie as she fought to get her children
out of the Iroquois Theate was
that she was pregnant with their fifth child, John/James
Clark, born eight months after the fire.
Blaney, Michigan
In 1902 William purchased land in Schoolcraft county
in Michigan's Upper
Peninsula and set about
building a sawmill community.
He named the little town Blaney after a friend who
captained a steamship on the Great Lakes. He
first built a lodge, then a few brown shingle
cottages for the men working on the property. A
shingle mill went up beside a pond and more cottages
were erected for the workers in the mill.
In the years after the fire
In 1904 William Mueller's Blaney town was complete and
in 1905 Michigan designated the thirty-three thousand
acre fifty-four square miles area as Mueller Township. Blaney
then included a small railroad network, saloon, and a
large home for the Mueller family (that years later would be named Celibeth Tavern
and remains today as a bed and breakfast) . In 1909
he sold the Blaney land to the Wisconsin Land and Lumber
Company of Hermansville, Michigan but the Mueller family
continued to vacation there until at least 1911.
In the 1920s-30s Blaney was turned into a summer
vacation resort with a golf course, lodge and man-made
lake that remained popular for many years, closing in
1965.
Thanks to the Schoolcraft Historical Society in
Manisteke for their nice summary of Blaney.
Barbarabell Mueller married Charles R. Bradley and had two
children. She served as president of multiple
Parent-Teacher Associations, was active in the Red Cross
during WWI and a member of the American Legion.
Florence Mueller became a career journalist and marketer.
After a decade or so in advertising, she joined the
Chicago Times newspaper (that became the Chicago
Sun-Times) and headed promotions and advertising, including
coordinating several local Chicago
television shows sponsored by the paper: "Quizdown,"
"Comic Capers,"▼5 "Women and
the World." She ran the annual Sun-Times Lincoln Park
Horse Shows and produced the Tiny Sun-Times Sunday children's section.
Frederick William Mueller (1901–1970)
became a telephone pole salesman in Minneapolis and married a
woman named Charlotte
Minnie Mueller
(1903–1995) married John Rindell and they had two
children.
John/James Clark Mueller
(1904–1981) married Kathlene Kite and they had two
children. They lived in Arizona where he worked
for Pacific Finance.
Discrepancies and addendum
1. The
Marshall Everette disaster book misstated the ages
of the girls as five and three and the Mueller address
as 3130 rather than 3118 Calumet.
2. The Everette book also attached two different stories to
the same family, describing Florence being thrown out onto
the sidewalk in one version and in another as being rescued from
inside the foyer and taken with her sister to a nearby
barber shop.
3. William Mueller and his
brother-in-law, Charles Robinson, each sent a
modest donation to the Samaritan Hospital after the
fire in appreciation for its care for Flossie Mueller. The hospital was struggling and grateful for
the gifts. (Charles was married to William
Mueller's youngest sister, Minnie Mueller, after whom
he'd named his daughter born eleven months before the
Iroquois Theater fire. All the Mueller children
were named after their ancestors. William's oldest
daughter, Barbarabell, who survived the Iroquois fire,
was named after her paternal grandmother, Eva Barbara
Mergenthaler, and maternal grandmother, Cordelia Belle
Payne.) The Samaritan Emergency
Hospital was at the corner of 481 Wabash and Eldredge
Court (9th St.) in Chicago. It had been opened in mid-1900 as a private
45-bed emergency treatment charity hospital to service
Chicago's downtown area and initially was distinguished
by being the first Chicago hospital with a Turkish bath
and for specializing in skin ailments. The
Samaritan was among eleven hospitals closed a month after the Iroquois
Theater fire for non-compliance with Chicago building
codes insofar as fire safety. It reopened a month later,
but briefly. It's proprietor, Dr. Lauris Blake
Baldwin (1870–1940), acquired the former Normandy
Hotel property but failed to raise sufficient funds to
convert it to a hospital. In 1907 Baldwin was
appointed city physician by Chicago mayor Busse.
In 1927 Baldwin retired and relocated to California..
4. The William Mueller Company
produced 125,000 white cedar telephone poles annually.
The pole industry followed the growth of
telegraph/telephone and railroad lines. Utility
pole info: the average pole in the U.S. is forty-feet
long with six of those feet buried in the ground. Today
they're usually made of Southern yellow pine with
concrete or steel used in environments where greater
wind and corrosion resistance is needed. The top-most
wires are electric with communication cables below.
In case you ever need to know the particulars of a
utility pole, look for the "birth mark" burned onto the
wood just below eye level. It tells you the
manufacturer, date of it's creation, type of wood
(SP=Southern Pine, WC=Western Cedar, DF=Douglas Fir),
type of preservative (C=creosote, P=pentachlorophenol,
SK=chromated copper arsenate), and ANSI class (the
determination of its maximum load capacity).
5. Comic Capers ran on WBKB TV. It featured Don and Vera Ward reading comics from the Sun-Times.
Six in party of 7
perished
Norton Sisters from Upper
Peninsula Michigan
Father
and daughter Bray survived
Other discussions you might find interesting
Story 2997
A note about sourcing. When this
project began, I failed to anticipate the day might come when a
more scholarly approach would be called for. When my
mistake was recognized I faced a decision: go back and spend years creating source lists for every page, or go
forward and try to cover more of the people and circumstances
involved in the disaster. Were I twenty years younger, I'd
have gone back, but in recognition that this project will end when I do, I chose to go forward.
These pages will provide enough information, it is hoped, to
provide subsequent researchers with additional information.
I would like to
hear from you if you have additional info about an Iroquois victim, or find an error,
and you're invited to visit the
comments page to share stories and observations about the Iroquois Theater fire.
