“An Ideal Fire Trap”

Wheeling High School Burns: January 3, 1914

“But on this cold and dreary morn,
In Engine Company 4,
There is a vacant bed upstairs,
For One, who is no more…”
-To The Wheeling Fire Dept. by Anonymous

One hundred two years ago today, just after 6 o’clock PM on Saturday evening, January 3, 1914, a janitor discovered a fire in the basement of Wheeling High School beneath the stairway. The janitor attempted to douse it with buckets of water, to no avail. The stairways and air ducts acted as flues, allowing the fire to rapidly ascend, spreading across the upper floors and all the way to the roof.

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“Undermanned and Under Equipped”

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The janitor ran a block to 21st Street to alert Hook and Ladder Company No. 6, and they were on the scene quickly. But heavy snows had damaged the wires of the city-wide alarm system, causing a delayed reaction from other firefighting companies. In fact, telephone calls had to be placed to sound the alarm. The entire building was soon aflame. The building, Fire Chief Rose later declared, “was constructed on the lines of an ideal fire trap.”

“I never saw a building that had so many air courses in it,” Rose told the Intelligencer. “Once a flame got started, it would ‘walk’ around faster than a person. The roof was one continuous chain of braces and rafters which made the whole thing like kindling wood ready to be touched off…The building was built in utter disregard of all fire protection.”

With the eye–opening House and Herrman department store fire that would inspire the technical “modernization” of firefighting in Wheeling still three years in the future, the fire department of 1914 Wheeling was still very much committed to horse drawn fire wagons and steam powered pumps. But the Wheeling High School fire was eye–opening in a different way — demonstrating that the Wheeling Fire Department was woefully “undermanned and under equipped.”

According to A History of Fire Fighting in Wheeling (1925): “There were but 50 firemen employed at that time. With two men required for each engine and at least three men for every hose line, the department was altogether unable to cope with a fire of such size…”

When the other city companies finally arrived, the men fought valiantly, throwing all they had at the inferno. Again according to A History of Fire Fighting in Wheeling (1925), “five steam engines pumped two streams each into the building and plug attachments added more water but all had little effect.”

Indeed, as the Intelligencer reported: “The firemen worked valiantly, but were working with odds against them in the building so long that the equipment would not reach to the necessary places.”

“If two fires would break out in the city,” Chief Rose told the Intelligencer, “we would be powerless with conditions as they exist now, with crossed wires, etc…”

After a few hours, the roof collapsed and the north wall fell, crushing to death two volunteers, Charles Talbourt of Wheeling and J.E. Buchanan of Parkersburg, and injuring several firemen, including Engine Co. No. 4 (8th Ward) Captain Charles J. Ferguson, who later died from his injuries.

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Aftermath

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By late in the evening, several thousand people, including many of the high school’s students, had gathered to watch the building burn. “[The latter] watched the demon fire gut the building,” the Intelligencer reported, “not with pleasure as the boy or girl of tender years, but with sorrow, expressed in every motion.”

An investigation spearheaded by the Board of Education later concluded that the fire had been caused by “spontaneous combustion of rags and shavings in a closet in the basement.” [Wheeling News-Register Dec, 12, 1958 report by Jay Niebur] Losses were estimated at approximately $100, 000 (23. 3 million in 2016 dollars), and were partially covered by insurance. The Board of Education paid to replace books and other items lost by the students in the fire, and classes were moved to Webster School while the Wheeling High School building was repaired and rebuilt.

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“No Wind that Blew Dismayed the Crew, Or Troubled the Captain’s Mind 
Embarking from the port of Sophomoric Turmoil, the Ship of ’15, Skipper Marsh at the helm, sailed smoothly across the sea of Juniority. The mid-voyage destruction of our high school home did not destroy our class spirit, for its oxy-acetylenic flame gleamed forth from even that patriarch of educational architecture, Webster School…”
–Wheeling High School Record, 1915

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The Building

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Designed by Wheeling Hall of Fame architect Frederick Faris, the new Wheeling High School was dedicated in 1909 and opened its doors to the public May 29th, 1911.

From the school magazine, The Wheeling High School Record, Commencement issue, 1911 :

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Following the January 1914 fire, the rebuilt Wheeling High School was reopened in September 1915, and continued to serve the city’s public high school students until 1976, when the new Wheeling Park High School opened. The building was razed in 1984.

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All that remains today of the Wheeling High School building is one of the original pillars, preserved in commemoration by the alumni association. Ninety-one year old Matilda Scharf, a member of the 1912 graduating class, cut the ribbon when the pillar was dedicated in 1985.

Though all that is left of the physical building today is this lone pillar, the legacy of Wheeling High School is much more than a pillar: it is the thousands Wildcat graduates who were educated within her halls and went on to make the world a better place.

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Sources: 

Callin’s Wheeling City Directory, 1914.
Plummer, R. and Hanlan, W. C., A History of Firefighting in Wheeling, Wheeling: E.B. Roberts, 1925.
Wheeling Fire Department Yearbook, 1944.
Wheeling High School Record, 1911, 1914 and 1915.
The Wheeling Intelligencer,  January 4-7, 1914.
The Wheeling News-Register, January 4-7, 1914, 1978, 1984, 1985.

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