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On December 30, 1903 forty-nine-year-old
Mary J. Frazier Dawson (b. 1854) took
her five-year-old granddaughter Gracie
Dawson (b.1898) and grown daughter,
elementary school teacher, Mary Ellen
"Nellie" Dawson (b. 1877), to the
Mr. Bluebeard matinee.
They sat at the north side of the third-floor
balcony — one of the deadliest theater
locations in history. When a stage
fire during Act II was fueled by a
backdraft, the flames were hurled out
into the smoke-filled auditorium in a
giant belch. The fireball was
instantly drawn up into the
balconies to consume a new reservoir of
oxygen.
The large pockets of oxygen had been
created by cold air flowing into the
north wall of the balconies
through opened fire escape exits.
There it was filtered by the gasping of
hundreds of terrified and desperate
theater goers. Thirteen hundred
had escaped from the auditorium, of
which two hundred were already dead and
dying in the alley outside and on
stairwells in the lobby. For the
four hundred still trapped in the
balconies, including Gracie and her
grandmother, the fireball brought a near
instant end to their struggle. At
3:50 pm the mechanical works in watches
melted sufficiently to stop operation
and the people collectively heaved a
final sigh.
It was America's worst theater disaster
and the site was the Iroquois Theater in Chicago.
Gracie and her grandmother
Mary died that afternoon. Their bodies
were identified by Gracie's father, William
T. Dawson Jr. Nellie incurred severe
burns to the face and hands from flames
that leaped from a lower level window as
she descended fire escape stairs.
Others escaping from the third floor
chose to jump to a certain death on the
cobblestones sixty feet below.
Nellie took a chance on surviving the
flames and almost made it.
She survived for nine days at
Passavant Hospital. They may have
been agonizing hours, however.
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Unmarried at
the time of her death, twenty-six-year-old Nellie boarded at 239 N. Harvey street and taught second and third grades at the
64th Avenue elementary school in Oak Park.*
She was one of over a
forty Chicago public school teachers who became
victims of the Iroquois Theater.
Mary may have felt a special bond with Gracie. She
had been named after Mary's daughter lost in 1886 at
age seven. Gracie
and her parents lived at 334 N. Harding.
Burial
The three Dawson's were buried side by side in the
Dawson family plot at Evergreen cemetery in Barrington,
IL with matching gravestones. Mary's and Gracie's
stones were engraved with Dec 30. 1903 as the date of
death and Nellie's with Jan. 8, 1904. Family
members of some Iroquois victims who died in the
first week after the fire, technically in 1904,
chose to have 1903 engraved on their tombstones but
the Dawson's went with accuracy. Something
tells me Nellie would have approved.
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Railroading family
Railroading seems to have been the Dawson family business.
William T. Dawson Jr. worked as a railroad engineer
for the Chicago Northwestern and his father, English
immigrant William R. Dawson Sr. (1851–1936 ),
worked as a railroad watchman. At the time of
the fire William R. Dawson and Mary Frazier Dawson had been
married for thirty-two years.
In the years after the fire
In 1905, two years after losing Grace, her parents,
William (1873–1960) and Myrtle E. Craney Dawson
(1877–1958), gave birth to a second child, a son
named Leroy Dawson.
William R. Dawson, widow of Mary Frazier Dawson, father
of Nellie Dawson and grandfather of Gracie Dawson,
lived with a common law wife, a dressmaker named Sarah
Hannah Gaylord Steel.
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Discrepancies and addendum
Mary Dawson's name was omitted from the coroner's inquest
list, or was submitted with an alternate spelling I've
not yet found. Nellie's
name was omitted from some victim's lists.
Nellie was sometimes reported as being
twenty-seven years old rather than twenty-six.
* Built at 416-420 64th Avenue in
1901, electrified in 1902, the name of the 64th
Avenue elementary school was changed to Hawthorne
School, then in 1985 was renamed the Percy Julian
Middle School. The name of the street was changed as
well, and is known today as South Ridgeland Avenue.
The structure was replaced in 2002.
To get to her job at the 64th Avenue elementary
school from her room on N. Harvey, Nellie may have
walked south on Harvey for two blocks, turned right
on South Blvd for two blocks, then continued south
on 64th/Ridgeland for another four blocks.
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