1/10/1883 Milwaukee, WI the Newhall House fire claims the lives of seventy-one of the 300 residences of the six-story wood frame hotel around 4:00 a.m. The original home of the Milwaukee Chess Club was located on the northwest corner of Main (now Broadway) and Michigan Streets. The six-story Newhall House was constructed by merchant Daniel Newhall in 1856, originally design as a hotel with apartment units. It was made of “Milwaukee-brick” but substructures were constructed out of wood. The Newhall had a history of close calls, catching fire two times before its fatal blaze. The hotel was considered a “tinder box” by the fire department. “The fire started on the first floor and managed to spread up an elevator shaft. It quickly reached all six stories. By the time the fire was discovered the flames were out of control, and the staff failed to arouse many of the guests and employees. Many managed to escape, and some Milwaukee citizens rushed to the blaze saving many lives that night as well. The guests that night included P.T. Barnum Circus stars, General and Mrs. Tom Thumb, in a sixth-floor room. A firefighter managed to get a ladder up to them and, holding the tiny couple under one arm and grasping the swaying ladder with the other, made his way cautiously down through the flames to safety. “We saw the flames breaking through the roof as we left the station”, recalled a firefighter. “By the time we reached the hotel, the building was like a flaming straw-stack. Men and women could be seen at their windows, shouting for help, screaming in despair”. The fire was a hard-fought fire, ladders of some the firefighters got caught in the new-fangled electric lines downtown, and never reached the building. Others could not stretch to the upper floors. Many guests, trapped by the inferno behind them chose to leap to their death in the streets below.” “The hotel register was destroyed, so it is not definitely known how many people were in the Newhall House that night. At least seventy-six bodies were pulled from the charred remains over the next several days. Of the bodies that were recovered, 55 in total. They were as followed: Taken to the morgue, 16. Received from the ruins, 26. Injured in the fire and died later, 8. The dead not taken to the morgue, 5. That being a total of 55. This did not include the fragments of bodies found, and or cremated in the fire itself. About 40 people were reported as missing and believed to be in the Newhall on the evening of the fire, and were unaccounted for, which swells the list to 90. It is almost sure that there were over 100 people that lost their lives in that event.” “Most of the dead were buried at one of two cemeteries, Calvary Cemetery and Forest Home Cemetery. Memorials were erected at both cemeteries.”
1/10/1906 Minneapolis, MN eight lives were lost, including one firefighter, in a fire that destroys the West Hotel. The fire started in the packing room on the first floor and was confined to the elevator shaft and top floor of the building. “The wood, in the elevator shaft, burned like tinder and a sheet of flames, twenty feet wide, mounted to the seventh floor, frightening the guests out of their senses and minds and induced a panic which struck terror to the stoutest of hearts.” “The firefighter died in action while attempting to rescue a woman trapped by fire on the seventh-floor of the West Hotel at Hennepin Avenue South and 5th Street. He was carrying her down a pompier ladder when her hysterical struggled threw them from the ladder. The woman was caught as she fell on a third-floor balcony, but he fell seven floors to the street and died instantly.”
1/10/1908 two Bronx, NY (FDNY) died at a five-alarm fire originated on the sixth floor of a 12-story commercial building, Box # 55-361, 225-233 4th Avenue. “After being superheated and then struck by fire streams, the steel columns supporting the upper floors suddenly buckled, collapsing eight floors into the cellar.” Three members of the Fire Patrol were carried down into the cellar, two were crushed to death under tons of rubble. A total of 50 other firefighters were injured in the collapse, many seriously.
1/10/1913 a Mobile, AL firefighter “lost his life when he was crushed beneath tons of falling brick, shortly after 7:00 p.m., while battling a spectacular fire at the Mobile Theater.”
1/10/1965 a San Francisco, CA firefighter “died from injuries he sustained while operating at an apartment fire at 1750 Taylor.”
1/10/1967 a Philadelphia, PA firefighter “died from injuries he sustained after he collapsed in the basement of a building while operating at a fire.”
1/10/1990 a twenty-year-old firefighter “died at the Carswell Air Force Base, Texas from a Halon related heart attack during an aircraft training incident.”
1/10/1999 an Oakland, CA firefighter “was crushed and killed at 3052 Broadway, in a two-story, balloon-frame building of mixed occupancy, with a residential area over the commercial premises, when the second floor of a turn of the century residential structure collapsed into the first floor. The fire eventually went to six-alarms. A total of four firefighters were trapped by the collapse.”
1/10/1976 a “natural gas leak in the basement at Pathfinder Hotel in downtown Fremont, NE exploded, and the ensuing fire killed twenty-three people at 9:32 a.m., most of the city block (six adjacent buildings) were destroyed. The hotel used as apartments occupied mostly by senior citizens. The natural gas leak that caused the explosion was believed to have been caused by an underground pipe separation. The “odor of the natural gas” had been detected about four hours before the explosion. The fire was able to spread vertically through inadequately protected elevator shafts, stairways, and pipe chases.”
1/10/1962 St. Louis, MO “a grain dust explosion killed three and injured forty-three at the Ralston Purina Company that sent fire “roaring through” the huge industrial complex. The explosion destroyed an old three-story granary and spread to a complex of milling buildings and an 11-story grain elevator.”
1/10/1962 Carterville, IL a mine gas explosion killed eleven at the Blue Blaze Coal Co.’s No. 2 mine northeast of Carterville at about 6:30 p.m.
1/10/1952 five stores and four offices were destroyed by fire in Haskell, TX that started in a cotton brokerage office when a porter tried to light a gas stove.
1/10/1940 Bartley, WV a coal mine gas explosion killed ninety-two in the southwestern tip of McDowell County, on of southern West Virginia’s busiest and richest coal sections, at Bartley No. 1 mine of the Pond Creek Pocahontas Coal Company.
1/10/1916 three residents were injured in their home when ten pounds of flash powder, used for photography, exploded in the dining room; the explosion destroyed the house.
1/10/1911 six died in Cincinnati, OH at the Chamber of Commerce fire in a building erected in 1884 at the southwest corner of Fourth and Vine. The fire started on the top floor clubroom kitchen as a “grease fire” during a banquet and extended to the timber frame roof. “The floors were suspended on steel trusses that, because of the high heat from the flames, gave way plunging all the floors to the basement. The only thing left standing was the masonry exterior walls.”
1/10/1908 Melrose, Iowa conflagration, offices and buildings of 12 small firms were destroyed by the fire; this fire was five days after the Albia, IA conflagration just 16.5 miles away.
1/10/1860 Pemberton Mill a large factory in Lawrence, MA collapsed and killed 145 and injured 166 employees in a five story 280’ by 84’ structure built in 1853 that the owners “jammed more machinery into their factory attempting to boost its profits”. The building contained 2,700 spindles and 700 looms employing more than six hundred workers, many of them women and children who became trapped just before 5:00 p.m. Around 9:30 p.m. while rescue operations were in progress, “someone accidentally knocked over an oil lantern. Flames raced across the cotton waste and splintered wood, some of it soaked with oil” forcing rescuers to retreat.
1/10/1840 Eaton’s Neck, Long Island, NY the Steamboat Lexington fire claimed 200 lives in Long Island Sound after leaving New York for Stonington at 3:00 p.m. Around 7:00 p.m. cotton stored on the deck caught fire near a smoke pipe. “The boat was headed, for the shore as soon as the efforts to extinguish the fire proved unsuccessful. She was provided with three boats, yet such was there the panic which took possession of all minds, that they were hoisted out while the boat was still under headway and immediately swamped. The engine a few minutes after gave way, leaving her utterly unmanageable.” “In one-hour she was burnt to the water’s edge and all but three persons perished.”