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.
“Undermanned and Under Equipped”
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.” Read More
Officially launched in December of 2014, 2015 was Archiving Wheeling’s first full year, and it was a indeed good year for our fledgling community experiment to bridge collections, tell stories, and preserve Wheeling’s history.
