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On December 30, 1903
Nellie Olive Padgitt Folice (b.1883)▼1 had been married for a year,
was pregnant,
and two weeks from her twenty-first birthday.
With limited means for dress-up apparel, she wore
her wedding dress to an afternoon matinee in
Chicago's elegant new Iroquois Theater. She knew
that in a few months, as her pregnancy progressed, the
dress would no longer fit. When a stage
fire spread to the auditorium, Nellie
became one of nearly six hundred of its
victims.
Though unconfirmed, it is likely that seated with Nellie at the Iroquois was an
Iroquois survivor cited years later in his obituary, her
husband's cousin, thirty-eight-year-old Charles P. Englehart, as well as his
wife, Dora, and Nellie's husband, Frank Folice.
Crossed-eye alert: this story involves: three related men
that during a fifty year period were institutionalized at the same insane
asylum, four brick masons, a man named Mason, a Charles E. Englehart
and a Charles P. Englehart, four men who called Watertown,
NY home, and three men with Phillip as their first or last name.
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Nellie's backstory
In 1900, seventeen-year-old Nellie lived
in Chicago, away from
her hometown in Barry, Illinois,▼2 with her aunt Martha Ellen
"Peggy" Padgitt Grant (1845–1910),▼3
and cousin George Walter Grant (1867–1937), a
watchmaker. Peggy's husband, William T.
Grant, was that year operating a sawmill outside Chicago and Peggy ran a boarding house.
One of Peggy's four lodgers was thirty-year-old Francis
"Frank" H. Folice (1869–1936), who operated a large
railway depot newsstand for Union News, division
of the American News Company, that monopolized newspapers in the railroad industry.
On December 22, 1902, just shy of her twentieth
birthday, Nellie married Frank, her aunt's lodger, and the pair set up
housekeeping at 301 Claremont Avenue in Chicago. (In 1909, the
street address was changed to 508. It may have been
an apartment above a storefront.)
December 30, 1903
I've not found published information about Nellie's location in the
Iroquois Theater auditorium or the identity of her companions, but believe she might
have been in a
foursome with her husband Frank, his cousin from Watertown, NY, Charles P. Englehart, and Charles' wife, Dora.
Charles' status as an Iroquois survivor was first mentioned nine years after the fire, in
his obituary. The common connection between he and Nellie's husband to the asylum
in Ogdensburg, NY led to the discovery that the men were first cousins , both from
Watertown and that Charles and his wife Dora lived in Chicago in 1903.
They'd followed Charles' older
brother, Fred,▼4 to Chicago only a year earlier and
would not have had a wide circle of acquaintances. It's not hard to imagine the
foursome planning a theater excursion during the holiday season.
Nellie's body was located at Jordan's funeral
home and identified by Frank. Also
searching for her body was her uncle William
Grant and probably her cousin Walter Grant.
She was cremated at Hillside, and her remains were
buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery — until recently, without a grave marker. In a
remarkable demonstration of familial respect, descendent Doug A. Padgitt stepped in and
honored Nellie's memory with a marker.
Nellie is Doug's grand aunt, her being
sister to his grandfather — John William Padgitt.
R.I.P. Nellie, your family has your back.
Nellie's family
Nellie was the second
oldest of fifteen children born to John William Padgitt
(1855–1928) and Florence Eva Harnsher Padgitt
(1861–1937) who had married in 1880. The family home was at 181 Rodgers
street in
Barry, Illinois. Barry is a burg in
west-central Illinois, the nearest city of size
being Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri.
John Padgitt worked as a section foreman for the
Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad.
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Nellie was around fifteen or sixteen when she
went to live with the Grants. They lived
then on South East Street in Jacksonville,
Illinois (a city that had once been home to the Padgitts). When the
Grants relocated to Chicago just prior to 1900, Nellie went along.
Nellie's brother George and sister
Ida Mae also relocated to the big city, and
Nellie's sister, Bessie Pearl, was "farmed out" to work
as a domestic servant around age twelve.
Possibly Nellie's role in
her aunt Martha's household was part niece and part
household helper. Moving to Chicago when they came of
age became a family tradition for the Padgitt
children.
As to Nellie, she may have left Barry skipping and
grinning — leaving behind ten siblings under age
ten, with more coming for the next several years. I'd have had
the zoomies for sure. Had she confided a sense of relief to her aunt,
Martha would have understood because she was herself one of ten
children.
Englehart and Folice families back story
Henry (1807–1877) and Christina Folice (1808–1888)
emigrated from Germany around 1860. They had two children, a son and a daughter — Phillip Folice (1843–1906) and Sophia Folice
(1838–1911) — each of which had a son.
Phillip Folice (married to Margaret Reed,
1843–1925) had a son named Frank Folice, and Sophia (married to Charles E. Englehart, 1829–1902) had
a son named Charles P. Englehart (1865–1912).
Brick masonry was the primary family trade.
The unhappy lives of Charles Englehart and Frank Folice after the fire
Both men died after years spent hospitalized in the
St. Lawrence State Hospital for the
Insane in Ogdensburg, New York, (as did Frank's younger brother, Albert Phillip Folice▼5).
Frank Folice
Frank Folice remarried four years after the Iroquois Theater
fire to a woman named Blanche Watkins who had a twelve-year-old son by a
prior marriage. By 1916, at age forty-seven, he was
one of over two thousand inmates in the insane
asylum in Ogdensburg, NY, St. Lawrence State
Hospital. He was out of the facility in October
1925, living in Ogdensburg, when his widowed mother
came for a visit. She died while staying at his
home, and by 1930 he was again a hospital inmate. He
died there of a heart attack after twenty years
at the facility. I found nothing in newspapers to
hint at the reason for his committal but from
researching other families know it cannot be
assumed he was mentally incompetent.
Despite the nomenclature, such facilities
sometimes accommodated patients with other
conditions such a tuberculosis, lameness or
blindness that prevented them from caring for
themselves. They often worked communally
in the asylums' fields or kitchens.
Charles Englehart
Charles Phillip Englehart was born and died in New York, son of Charles E. Englehart, a brick mason,
and Sophia Englehart. He too became a mason, and in 1889 married Dora Edith Wilder (1867–1925),
a girl from Smithville, NY. They
lived in his hometown, Watertown, New York, until at least 1901 and had one child, a
daughter named Dorris — who married a man with the last name Mason.
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Discrepancies and addendum
I am
obligated to Padgitt family historian Margie
Hill for her 2005 description of her
grandparents arrival in Barry and their life there.
Nellie was counted twice in the 1900 U.S. Census —
once as a resident of her aunt's home in Chicago and
a second time as a resident of her parent's home in
Barry, Illinois.
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Charles and fire alarm
According to the wording in an obituary notice
published by a few newspapers, Charles
explicitly claimed to have discovered the fire and called in the alarm.
Not all newspaper stories worded it that way and I found no confirmation that
this was true — or, for that matter, that he was even at the Iroquois.
Until learning of the familial relationship to Nellie Folice, I suspected his
claim of being at the Iroquois was the delusion of a man with mental
illness, a regrettable assumption on my part. I think he was
present, and alerted his companions to the fire, but the only way he
could have discovered it is if he was back stage.
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1. Though described as twenty-one years old and
twenty-two years old in 1903 and 1904 newspapers, in
multiple 1900 census reports, and on her marriage
license, Nellie's birthday was given as January
1883, making her twenty at the time of her
death. The name Padgitt was sometimes spelled Padgett or Padget.
The name Folice was sometimes spelled Follice.
The name Englehart was sometimes spelled Inglehart.
2. In 1894 a fire that destroyed half the businesses and several homes
in Nellie's hometown, Barry, IL, started at the Hollembeak Opera House. The population of Barry,
IL during Nellie's childhood and today is around 1,300, with fewer than 550 households.
3. In 1900, US Census enumerator's handwriting for the name Grant looks like Yrast.
4.
Charles' elder brother, Frederick John Englehart (1856–1925), had left Watertown
and settled in Chicago by at least 1894 when he married a Chicago girl, Elizabeth
"Lizzie" Kelleher (1862–1943) . He was co-owner of a steam heating
company, Englehart & Stott at 82 W. Washington. In December, 1903 his wife,
like Nellie Folice, was pregnant, and had a toddler to look after. (Lizzie bore six
children, of which five survived to adulthood.) Two of the couple's sons, Tom
and Fred jr, were of an age to have appreciated the Mr. Bluebeard
production but there is zero evidence that Fred Englehart's family was at the
Iroquois. Am mentioning it here as a self reminder in case something turns up later.
One of Fred's son's was named after his grandfather and uncle, Charles E. Englehart.
5. According to his WWI draft card, Albert Phillip Folice (1880–1959) was hospitalized
as an insanity patient at St. Lawrence in 1918, and according to the 1920 and 1950 U.S. Census he was hospitalized at
St. Lawrence in those years as well. Frank Folice lived with Albert for a short
time.
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