Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's HistoryGodbey, Allen Howard
History
Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History
Godbey, Allen Howard
Disasters
Falls City Hall was the theatre of the principal loss of life. It was a
brick building fronting on Market between Eleventh and Twelfth. The
ground-floor had long been used as a market, and contained forty or
fifty stalls of gardeners and butchers. These stalls were closed and the
keepers were absent at the hour of the disaster. In front on the second
floor were three small rooms, one of them utilized as an office, the
other two as toilet rooms. Behind these was a large hall, and in the
rear of this still another hall, in which a young lady, her father,
brother and sister being present, was teaching a dancing school. There
might have been sixty-five persons in this room, though one witness says
twenty-eight. In one of the small rooms seven men, constituting the
Executive Committee of the Roman Knights, was holding a business
meeting. In another room a band of musicians, fifteen in number, were
going through a rehearsal. Some decorators were at work in the large
hall, preparing it for some coming occasion. On the third floor were
assembled the Jewel Lodge No. 2 of the Knights and Ladies of Honor, with
an attendance of a hundred or more. In an adjoining hall the Humboldt
Lodge No. 146 of I. O. O. F. with seventeen members was in session. The
whole number of people in the building must have been nearly or quite
two hundred. In an instant the fearful wrench of the cyclone had twisted
the building into fragments, and tumbled it in shapeless ruin upon the
inmates.
Ten minutes after the collapse might have been seen a frantic multitude
hastily gathering from all quarters, among them many women clutching
vainly with their fingers at the slate roof, and madly tearing at the
wreck beneath which the imprisoned and wounded were crying for help.
Presently, fire broke out, but it was happily extinguished. The work of
rescue was now organized and speedily set in motion, but an hour elapsed
before the first victim was extricated. This was a lady, found sitting
upright with bruised head and broken arm. She told of her vain effort to
escape, and of the position in which she had last seen her companions.
Meanwhile, some were digging in the center of the debris in answer to a
voice which grew fainter and fainter until it was hushed forever. The
work of rescue was now shifted to the other end of the pile.
James Hassen was foremost among the workers, and on reaching the hall
room of the Knights and Ladies, he took from the ruins the first body,
which proved to be that of his wife, and who expired in his arms. He
gently laid his dead wife aside, and hurried again to aid in recovering
the rest. Presently, ten women were reached, clasped in each others
arms--all dead but one. The dancing room was
[Illustration: AT WORK IN THE WRECK.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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