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When Avice Oldaker Pridmore died in the summer of 1903 at age seventy-two, if
her last thoughts about her children and
grandchildren were optimistic, she had good reason.
It had been a gamble to uproot the family and leave
England in 1880 but opportunities in America
fulfilled the expectations of even as deeply rooted
a UK native as Avice.* The move from Minnesota to Chicago
also turned out to have been the right one.
The farm had been a fine place to raise six children
but the boys, now grown, needed a bigger city to
stretch their talents. Her late husband,
William Hales Pridmore (1823–1900), had been gone for three
years but lived long enough to see his sons
begin making names for themselves in Chicago, John as an
architect, William and Edmund in real estate.
Daughters Catherine and Emma had married well and
Edith's wedding, scheduled for January 1904 in
England, was all a mother could hope for her
daughter. Publicity about the row between
William and his wife Fanny a few months ago had
been distasteful but Avice may have had a mother's
instincts for such things and known there was still
love in the marriage, despite the divorce. The loss nine years earlier
of Emma and Zylotes firstborn, Benjamin, had been
wrenching but recent years had been bountiful.
Zylote's career was a success and they had
three little ones, with a fourth due in
December. Despite the relocations and death of
their parents, Avice and William's brood remained
close. Though they could not protect one
another from life's difficulties, they supported one
another during the years that followed.
~~~~~~~~
It is likely Avice's children remarked it
was fortunate she did not live to suffer over a
decade of tragedy that befell her children after her
death — including the early deaths of two daughters
and six grandchildren. The twelve-year-long cycle of
misery for the Pridmore children began on December
30, 1903. This webpage tells that story. William and Fanny's
remarriage didn't last. Of the other two Pridmore
sons, Edmund lost a thirteen-year-old daughter and
John lost his wife, Clara, when she was fifty years old. The
third Pridmore daughter, Catherine, died in 1913 at
age fifty-one. For Emma and Zylotes, Erle's
parents, there would be financial prosperity but on
the personal front, continuing sorrow.
Thirty-two-year-old Edith Pridmore and her
nephew, seven-year-old Erle P. Martin, died at an
afternoon matinee of a Mr. Bluebeard
Christmas play in the worst theater fire
in America's history at Chicago's newest
luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater.
They became trapped in the third-floor
balcony when the fire broke out.
Up to a hundred people blocked exits to the lobby.
Flames pouring
through windows and exits on lower
levels made the fire escape stairs
impassable. When painters at
Northwestern,
Charles Cubbon and
Joseph Leibert, stretched planks
across Couch Place alley, Edith and Erle
were two of approximately twenty-five
people who braved the eighteen-foot
crossing, sixty feet above the ground.
Earle fell to his death. Edith
made it across but was severely burned. She
was taken to the Sherman House hotel where she died
of inhalation injuries later that
evening. She was conscious long
enough to speak of Erle's fall and her
plank crossing.
From 1897 through to the 1902–3 school year Edith had been one of
seventeen teachers at the Tilton School in Cicero, a
suburb west of Chicago. By December of 1903, she
had left the teaching post to oversee the household of her
brother, William A. Pridmore (1866–1937), at 5756 Kimbark
Ave in Hyde Park on the University of Chicago
campus. William was a prominent realtor in
Chicago.†
John E. O. Pridmore
(1863–1940), another of Edith's brothers, identified
her body. A Chicago
architect, John was the husband of Clare G. Lee Pridmore
(1864–1914), a Scandinavian girl. They lived at 3026
Magnolia Avenue — a two-story wood-frame structure
built in 1899 for $4,000 (inflation-adjusted to
$124k).‡ Immediately after the Iroquois fire,
John asked the president of his Illinois chapter of
American Institute of Architects, George Beaumont,
to petition
mayor Harrison to close Chicago theaters for
inspections. Beaumont declined but Harrison
later did so. John was vehemently opposed to the practice of
limiting certain exits to emergency use.§
Erle Pridmore Martin
(1896–1903)was the son of Emma Caroline Pridmore Martin (1867–1948),
Edith Pridmore's sister, nicknamed Emmie, and Quebeck native, Zelotes Earl Martin
(1862–1948) who commonly went by just Z. E. Two days before the Iroquois fire
Emma and Zelotes had celebrated their eleventh wedding
anniversary. Zelotes E. Martin was a co-owner of
the Martin-Senour paint manufacturing company,
founded in 1878 and in 1917 acquired by
Sherwin-Williams. (Martin-Senour remains today as a
subsidiary and brand of Sherwin-Williams finishes.)
Frank B. Martin
(1866–1943), an uncle, identified Erle's body based on
his shoes. They were
new and the boy had been especially proud to wear them to
the theater that day. Frank, a house painter
in Chicago, in 1914 became the husband of Salome E.
Singleton Martin (1894–1950),
with whom he had at least three children.
A double funeral was held at the Martin's home at
noon on Saturday, January 2, 1904, after the fire.
Burial was in Forest Home Cemetery,
Edith in a plot
with her father and mother, later joined by a brother and
sister.
In the years after the fire
William and Fannie's second go at marriage wasn't successful and after
producing a son, William Pridmore Jr., they each
remarried others.
Records for William and his son are a
bit tangled. William Sr. married Blanche
Watkins Forth, a widow with several children, and
either he or William Jr. was married to a Belle
Thurber, resulting in a daughter named Martha.
John Edmund Oldaker Pridmore served as head of the Iroquois Theater
Memorial Association in 1908 and 1934. He drew up plans for the
Iroquois Memorial Hospital
but I've not been able to verify that his were the plans
ultimately used for the structure. 1908
newspapers reported that John and his wife might have been
victims of the 1905 Mt. Etna earthquake while traveling in Europe but
the couple was eventually located
unharmed. (The Pridmores and Martins were
successful but hard working. They traveled to
foreign ports but not frequently enough to fray their passports.)
John remarried after
his wife Claire's 1914 death, to "Blossom" Hull,
with whom he had two sons, John Pridmore Jr. and
Robert Pridmore.
Two more children were born to
Emma and Zelotes after losing Erle at the Iroquois.
The parents lived to see five of their offspring die in
childhood, including a five-year-old daughter named after her aunt, Iroquois Theatre fire
victim Edith Susan.
Because there was so
much sadness in Emma and Zelote's lives, it's nice
to report that their son Wells seems to have enjoyed
a life that would have pleased his grandmother Avice
Oldaker Pridmore. In 1917, perhaps using
monies generated by the sale of the paint company, Emma and Zelotes
purchased a ten-room brick colonial on 150 feet of
South Shore drive overlooking Lake Michigan. When Wells returned from
World War I he married Janet McLaughlin Martin and
moved his family into the home with his parents — where they
could lavish some of the attention on their
grandchildren that they'd been unable to devote to
their lost sons and daughters.
Discrepancies and addendum
There was also a
Henry Pridmore in the audience at the Iroquois
but I found no familial connection between he and
this family.
* In England, Avice's
grandparents are buried at the Holy Trinity Church
in Stratford-Upon-Avon, also host to William
Shakespeare's tomb. Memorial tablets for
William and Avice Oldaker are on the south wall of
the church.
† William A. Pridmore and
his wife, Toronto native, Fannie Milne Pridmore,
were divorced six months before the fire, with him
citing as cause her suspicious relationship with her
physician. They were on the verge of reconciling
when the emotional turmoil of Edith's death caused a
reappraisal of relationships and a week after the
fire, on January 7, 1904, they remarried.
‡
In 1904 John E. O. Pridmore was
selected as the architect to oversee reconstruction
following fire damage on a seven-story combination
apartment and manufacturing building for Herbert E.
Bucklen (c1847-1917) at 800 Michigan Avenue (site of
today's Essex Inn Hotel), a building known then as
the
Bucklen Flats. Bucklen was a prominent
businessman from Elkhart, Indiana and friends with
Iroquois Theater manager Will J. Davis, also of
Elkhart. In fact, Davis briefly worked for a patent
medicine company when he first moved to Chicago
after the Civil War and Bucklen may have been his
employer. Though far from Bucklen's income
bracket, Davis and he were the same age and had much
in common: substantial involvement with the railroad
and theater industries and roots in both Elkhart and
Chicago. Though probably not close friends,
they exchanged Christmas cards and
had common friends and business associates in
Elkhart (Charles
G. Conn and
Orville Chamberlain) and in Chicago (playwright
George Ade and Pulitzer winning newspaper
cartoonist,
John McCutchen). Chicago was a smaller
world then, with the kind of excitement generated by
a city in go-go mode. Prior to the Iroquois
fire, Davis, with his theater syndicate connections,
was on an upward trajectory that gave him
elbow-rubbing opportunities that might otherwise
have been beyond his social status.
§ "Make all exits
usable all the time" was the gist of architect John Pridmore's position.
Henrietta and Natalie
Eisendrath
Stagehands at 1903
Iroquois Theater
Eugene Field Chicago
journalist and poet
Other discussions you might find interesting
Story 2827
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.
