We looked last week at Steuben County’s worst road accident (1943) and worst train wreck (1912) – counting by the number of deaths in each case. This week I want to look at our worst fire disaster.
*We’ve had plenty of them. EVERYBODY’S favorite pastime back in the 1800s was burning their town down. Construction was wood… you used fire for heat, light, cooking, and power… communications were slow, transit was slow, water systems were poor… fires were frequent, and were frequently devastating.
*On September 24, 1856, folks in Hornby and Caton were coping with widespread forest fires. No rain to speak of had fallen for three weeks, and on at least one day high winds blew. The hills were burning and on the eighteenth people had tried to contain the fires until sundown, when a heavy shower finally fell. But it quickly dried up again. Barns and log houses were lost, and smoke stung even indoors.
*On November 5, 1859, a fire started near the current site of the Chat A Whyle Restaurant in Bath. It quickly spread, reaching Steuben Street in the south and Gansevoort on the east, and creeping northward toward William Street. Thanks to hard work by fire fighters it never quite reached William, but everything else in that block was destroyed — homes, barns, the Eagle Hotel, the Beekman Sash Factory, a livery stable and numerous shops. Rebuilding began at once.
*Just after midnight on January 3, 1877, fire was discovered at the Arcade Restaurant on Pine Street in Corning. Trouble at the pumping station cut off the water supply, and the fire soon roared from Market Street to what we now call Dension Parkway. The restaurant, three clothing stores, a grocery, and a tobacco shop were lost. Erie station, a dry-goods store, and a lawyers’ office were damaged.
*Addison lost most of its downtown in 1879.
*A Painted Post fire on May 16, 1896 destroyed a hotel, orchestra hall, machine shops, barns, residences. 70 men were put out of work.
*On October 15, 1963 a small fire got out of hand on the dry hillside south of Bath. Soon two hundred firefighters were in action — and then five hundred. By the second day the fire roared for a mile across Mossy Bank, stretching between Babcock Hollow and Cameron Road. Backfires were started. Four thousand gallons of water were dropped by air. The fire took three days to bring under control.
*But our WORST fire was the “Steuben County Horror” on April 7, 1878 at the County Poorhouse outside Bath. Inmates in those days were locked in every night, especially in a two-story building for the insane, epileptic, elderly, disabled, and mentally handicapped… and their children.
*The superintendent locked things up and left. Reportedly an inmate who suffered seizures set fire to his cell, and the flame quickly spread.
*Not only were inmates locked in cells but the two-story building was itself locked up, and the keys were nowhere to be found. Staff enlisted able-bodied inmates from other buildings to fight the blaze, but with no equipment and limited water they could do little. A one-legged inmate broke a window and hauled a mother and child to safety, and the door was finally broken in, allowing ten or a dozen suffocating people to stagger out.
*Bath firefighters saw the glow in the sky and set off, but decided en route that they would be too late to help, especially considering that there was no water on site. They turned around and went home.
*Sixteen people died, down to and including an infant and a four year-old… it was illegal to keep children in such facilities, but Steuben was always lax about such requirements. A coroner’s jury found no one to indict, though to their belated credit the county supervisors immediately started taking the place in hand.
*And what was Steuben County’s SECOND worst fire disaster? Well, as far as I can tell it was an earlier fire at this same poorhouse, one which killed “only” seven people. The 1878 blaze was the third fatal fire at the facility in twenty years. The only bright spot is that it was also the last.