Boyertown Opera House Fire recalled
Horrific carnage made headlines all over the world in 1908
In January of 1908 Mrs. Harrison Bickel of Pottsville had a dream in which, according to The Pottstown Daily News, she saw “many coffins arranged to bury the dead after a great catastrophe.”
Several days later the dream’s meaning was revealed when she learned that two of her relatives were among the 169 people who died in a fire on Monday evening, Jan. 13, in a theater in Boyertown. Bickel’s nightmare was a reality for her and thousands of others.
The components for this disaster — a large crowd, an
unsafe room, open flames and flammable materials — were all there, and human error provided the catalyst that caused them to erupt into a conflagration that ranks as one of the deadliest theater fires in United States history.
A play, “The Scottish Reformation,” was performed by members of St. John’s Lutheran Church of Boyertown as a fundraiser. Its author was Harriet E. Monroe of Washington, D.C., who for almost a quarter of a century made her living creating similar productions. For 85 percent of the gross receipts she served as the director, supplied the costumes, and between acts gave lectures glossed by slides. Her work was very popular and this was the second time that St. John’s pastor, the Rev. Adam Weber, hired her.
Almost all of the audience were people who lived in the Boyertown area; most were family and friends of the 60-member cast.
The theater, known as the Opera House, was in the Rhoads Building, a three-story brick structure on the northwest corner of Philadelphia Avenue and Washington Street built in 1885 by Thomas Rhoads, a successful Boyertown doctor and businessman. Located on the second floor, 20 feet above street level, the theater was flanked on both sides by a small business office. On the third floor was a large room rented by some of the town’s lodges for monthly meetings; that night it doubled as dressing room.
According to Dr. Rhoads, the part of theater that seated the audience was 42-feet deep and 70-feet-wide, with a 12- to 14-foot ceiling. The night of the performance at least 310 people, probably a few more, were in it, so each occupant had slightly less than 9.5 square feet of space. Standing on a yardstick will put that number in perspective, or inviting 38 people to sit on folding chairs in your 12-by20-foot living room will give a better appreciation for the density of the crowd.
It was impossible for many people to leave the theater quickly. The main entrance at the rear of the auditorium had a set of double doors that opened inward and one of them was bolted shut. The only other door, and few of the audience knew about it, was at the back of the stage and opened unto stairs that exited onto Washington Street.
In 1904, three fire escapes were attached to the building, but only two of them, one on each side of the theater, were accessible from the theater. The only way to reach them was by climbing through windows that were about three feet above the floor, and there were no exit signs to indicate which windows led to them.
Getting to the doors and window exits was even more difficult because, in addition to the auditorium’s 108 permanent seats, 200 folding chairs set up for the evening’s performance blocked the side aisles.
Flammable materials were abundant. The auditorium’s interior was varnished wood, its lights and the stage lights used kerosene and a full can of it was stored under the stage, and the stage’s 24-year-old muslin curtain would go up like a thousand matches if it caught fire.
By far the most dangerous element was the stereopticon projector used to show colored slides with the lectures. The projector’s light was created by burning small blocks of lime, which produced light so brilliant it could be seen for over a mile at sea, and by lighting a combination of carbonized hydrogen gas — the illuminating gas of that era — and oxygen, which were stored in separate tanks and fed to the projector through rubber hoses.
Even though this method was in use for 25 years, it was dangerous and required a welltrained operator.
The projectionist that evening, 21-year-old Henry Fisher, who had only two days of training and no performances under his belt, did not fill the bill.
During the third-act intermission, the lecture, given by Della Mayer, Harriet Monroe’s sister, was under way when the audience became aware of what a survivor described as a “sharp whistling sound from the magic lantern (slide projector).”
The whistling, caused by gas escaping through a loose hose, alarmed many in the audience and brought them to their feet, causing chairs to scrape on the floor.
The commotion drew some actors in front of the curtain, knocking over several of the kerosene footlights, starting small fires.
Some of the men in the front row attempted to throw the burning fuel tank and footlights out of the window, but the metal tank collapsed, spreading the burning kerosene. The stage curtain was soon ablaze.
Then the escaping gas met the open flames with horrifying results. Charles Spatz, one of the men trying to dispose of the fuel tank, remembered “a sudden flash, intense heat and a tremendous fire.” Spatz thought the “flame from the oil tank seemed to ignite suddenly the gas, and the whole room was lighted in a flash.”
Spatz then “groped” his way to the nearest window. Before he went out, he turned around for another look and saw “a hot glowing flame over the whole room.” It appeared to him that “everybody was dead or seemed to be dead.”
A handful of people lucky enough to be near the double doors were able to leave, but because one of the doors was bolted shut and the other opened inward the press of the panicstricken crowd quickly prevented others from getting out.
William Wien and his son, Warren, arrived at the theater in time to save some of those caught at the door. They unbolted the locked door and those pressed against it ”fell on their faces.” Father and son began grabbing them by the shoulders and pulling them out as fast as possible, until the intense heat forced them to retreat.
Some in the theatergoers managed to make it to the fire escapes. One man threw his young son out of the window, even though he feared the child would be severely injured in the fall. Miraculously, the boy landed on the fire escape landing and reached the ground safely.
Most of the cast members and a handful of people in the first row of seats found safety through the door at the rear of the stage.
A few people jumped. One man went out of a third-floor window and landed on his back, in the process losing a fingertip, while another bailed out on the second floor and landed unhurt.
However, in the panic and chaos that reigned inside the burning room, many people died.
The fire eventually claimed 169 victims, including Della Mayer and a volunteer fireman who was mortally injured when the machine he was helping to pull to the blaze veered out of control and pinned him against a tree.
The funerals went on for days. The 24 dead who could not be identified were buried in a mass grave in Fairview Cemetery.
In a tragedy of this magnitude, where so many things went wrong, it seemed as if someone had to be held responsible. On Jan. 28, Dr. Robert Strasser, the Berks County coroner, convened an inquest in Boyertown for the purpose of assigning blame.
On Jan. 30, the jury assigned “primary cause” of the fire to Harriet E. Monroe for hiring an “unexperienced and incompetent operator of the calcium light” and to Harry McClellan Bechtel of Pottstown, the state’s deputy factory inspector, “for failure to enforce proper and adequate fire escapes and fire appliances as well as failure to enforce the existing laws insuring public safety.”
The panel requested that the Berks County district attorney arrest Monroe and Bechtel and “if possible” convict them of criminal negligence.
After a month’s deliberation, Berks County District Attorney Harry Schaeffer announced there would be no prosecutions because it could not be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Monroe was criminally negligent and that by Pennsylvania law Bechtel had no authority to interfere with a building’s interior construction.
In the wake of the decision not to bring criminal charges, two Boyertown men who lost their wives in the fire, lodged a suit against Dr. Rhoads for damages, but the case was dismissed.
The survivors had to get on with the difficult task of rebuilding their lives. Seven-year-old Rebecca Hoffman survived the fire, but her mother, her brother and a cousin who lived with them died.
In her book, “A Town in Tragedy,” Boyertown author Mary Jane Schneider relates how years later Rebecca recalled that before going to bed that fateful night she told her father, “I need to clean my shoes. My mother will not like to see my dirty shoes.”
She continued, “My father watched me clean my shoes. He put me to bed and stayed with me all night. He must have known that my mother, brother, and cousin had died in the fire.”