"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater HorrorEverett, Marshall
History
"Lest We Forget": Chicago's Awful Theater Horror
Everett, Marshall
Iroquois Theater, Chicago -- Fire, 1903; Theaters -- Fires and fire prevention
The request was generally followed, and on that mournful day the interment
of the victims of the holocaust began, filling the streets with
processions moving to the grave. From daybreak until evening funeral
corteges moved through the streets. Church bells at noon tolled a requiem.
The machinery of business was hushed in the downtown district, and long
lines of carriages, preceded by hearses or plain black wagons, followed
the theater victims to the grave.
In no public place, in no home was the grief of the bereft not felt. Many
of the dead were taken directly from the undertaking rooms to the
cemeteries and buried with simple ceremony. Before dark nearly 200 victims
were borne to the grave. A score were taken to railroad stations, to be
followed by the mourning back to their homes.
BUSINESS WORLD IN MOURNING.
The board of trade closed at 11 o'clock. The doors of the stock exchange
were not opened. Few of the downtown mercantile houses and few of the
offices were open after noon. There was little business.
It was a day of mourning, and the army of the sorrowful that for days had
searched for its dead performed the last rites. At noon bells in all the
church towers were rung to the rhythm of "The Dead March in Saul." Those
who heard the solemn dirge stood still for the space of five minutes with
bared heads. The proclamation of the mayor generally was observed.
Everywhere there was gloom and no one could escape from the pall that
enshrouded Chicago.
The demand for hearses was so great that the undertakers were compelled to
make up schedules in which the different hours of the day were allotted to
the grief-stricken.
Flags were at half-mast, while white hearses bearing the bodies of
children and black hearses with the bodies of others took their way to the
various churches. In some blocks three and four hearses were standing, and
at the churches one cortege would wait until another moved away.
The pall seemed to pervade the air itself. Pedestrians halted on the
sidewalk, and in the cold stood with bared heads while the funeral
processions passed.
Children saw their parents laid away; parents followed the coffins of
their child. Students just reaching manhood or womanhood were laid at
rest, while relatives and companions mourned. Kindly clergymen wept as
they spoke words of comfort to those bereft of father, mother, brother,
sister, or even of all.
Two double funerals passed through the downtown districts just as the
department stores were dismissing their thousands of employes. Sisters
were being taken to their last resting place, and this cortege was
followed by two white hearses containing the bodies of another brother and
sister. Both funeral processions went to the same depot, and all four
victims were buried in the same cemetery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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