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Seventeen-year-old Ruth Moulton Robbins (b. 1886)
Ruth was the daughter of Charles H. and the late Nellie Robbins,
and the granddaughter of Ellen and Hiram Moulton, a
one-time mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. The family lived in Chicago in 1900 but
after Nellie's death from tuberculosis in 1902 Charles and Ruth had
moved to Madison. Charles continued to work as an auditor for
the Swift meat packing company.
In 1903, Ruth, and maybe her father as well, was
visiting in Chicago for the Christmas holiday,
staying with the Herbert and Mary Hemmingway family
at 5936 Parnell Avenue. Herbert and his two sons
worked at the Swift packing company with Ruth's
father and had a daughter a few years older than
Ruth.
Charles and an unnamed friend, possibly Herbert
Hemmingway, spent a day looking for Ruth's body, finally
finding her at the Cook County morgue. She was
identified by a locket that had belonged to her
mother containing a photo of her father and by her
shoes, purchased from a Madison shoe store. The hair
on the back of her head had been burned away. A
gruesome and untrue story appeared in a Wisconsin
newspaper about Charles having waded through
knee-deep blood while searching for his daughter's
body. Blood wasn't knee deep in the Iroquois auditorium
and certainly not in the morgue. In walking
past rows of damaged corpses in morgues his pant
legs could easily have brushed bodies and become
soiled, but there was no wading.
A funeral was held at the family's home on Sunday, January 3, 1904 (see clipping above) and
Ruth was entombed in a vault and in the spring buried in the Moulton family plot in Forest
Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin. Eva
Hire's grandmother sent flowers for Ruth's funeral
in Madison.
Charles and Ruth lived with her
grandmother, Ellen Moulton, at 924 Jennifer St.in Madison.
Known for her outgoing and generous personality,
Ellen lost her husband Hiram in 1899, and her only
daughter, Nellie, two years later so was probably
pleased to open her home to her granddaughter and
son in law.
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Charles Robbins and David Hire were two of over twenty thousand employees of
Gustavus F. Swift's
beef packing plant, helping to keep track of over $200 million in annual
sales. Gustavus died in March,1903 following complications from surgery.
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Fifteen-year-old Eva C. Hire (b. 1888)
Eva was the daughter of the late David and Mary Cool Hire. Prior to
becoming ill her father had worked for Swift Co., first as a clerk,
then as a traveling salesman. In April, 1903, as his pulmonary
problems worsened, he and Mary went to live in Hooper, Colorado. He
died there two months later. While her parents were in
Colorado, Eva remained in Chicago, living with her
aunt and uncle, photographer Charles and Grace Cool
Mayo, at 613 W. 62nd St. Eva attended the Lewis-Champlin
school. Other students from Lewis-Champlin who became Iroquois
Theater victims included
Lucile Oakey, and the
Rimes boys, Myron and Martin.
Eva's body was identified by her uncle,
noted Chicago architect
Ernest A. Mayo (Charles' brother). Mayo
specialized in luxury homes for Chicago's wealthy,
outputting over one design a year from 1900 to 1920.
Eva was buried alongside her father in Cordova Cemetery in Rock Island,
Illinois, followed by Mary in 1942.
In the years after the fire
Mary Hire remarried in
1906, to Edward Altenbern, and they spent the rest
of their lives in Elgin and Rock Creek, Illinois.
Ernest A. Mayo designed homes for Chicago's wealthy
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