physician at the prison hospital, April 21, 1930
Once the fire danger had passed late Monday night, reporters and survivors in search of fellow convicts were curious as to the human consequences of what had just transpired. One intrepid reporter described scenes of carnage and the reactions of inmates as they searched the corpses in the penitentiary quadrangle before they were taken away to a temporary morgue at the fairgrounds. He saw “scores of closely cropped heads protruding from beneath water soaked blankets, pair after pair of roughly shod feet and here and there a seared hand … shapeless masses that lay row upon row.” One of the survivors “searched tirelessly among the corpses for his cell buddy, throwing the beams of his lantern into one horrible face after another.” One journalist on the scene as the identification process continued in the prison yard described “bobbing lanterns” throwing “ghastly circles of yellow light on the upturned faces as the men detailed to the job of identification made their rounds. They did not look at the features of the corpses” if possible, but focused their attention on the stenciled numbers on their prison uniforms.1
Paul Ferguson, the son of the Plain City, Ohio funeral director, recalled sixty years after the fire what he considered “the darkest memories in his career as mortician.” The sixteen-year- old happened to answer the telephone at the family funeral home the night of the fire to find out one of the victims was the son of local residents who had just been notified by prison officials to come to Columbus to recover the body for burial. Ferguson and his brother Jay wasted no time heading out to retrieve the body. It is unclear where Ferguson’s father was at this time or how long the teenager or his brother had been involved in the family business, but it seems Ferguson was familiar with the mortuary business. He recounted in 1990, “I wasn’t even supposed to be in there, not at my age. But I sneaked in anyway because we had to get the boy.” While in the prison courtyard he took the opportunity to look at some of the dead bodies. The body he was to bring back “wasn’t burned nearly so bad as some were, but he was pretty bad. Some of these guys were pretty near cremated.”2
Young Ferguson witnessed firemen still struggling to put the fire out as shaken prisoners carried out dead convicts from the cellblocks and laid them prone in the yard. Some of them were embalmed on the spot. Ferguson observed one embalmer using a long tube, known as a trocar, “[inserting it] through the victim’s abdomen to shoot embalming fluid in.” He explained “that was about all you could do with a lot of them. They were too badly burned.” Ferguson recounted how, despite the frenetic aftermath of the disaster, the prison yard seemed “cloaked in sudden silence.”3
On Tuesday morning, parole officer Dan Bonzo released the “first official account” of the dead, tallied at 276. Given the confusion at the scene, the count would fluctuate over the first twenty-four hours. One spokesman for the prison hospital put the figure at 336, while journalists who had free rein following the fire counted the “dead strewn around” the prison yard as 305.4 Row after row of bodies were still lying on the water-soaked prison courtyard during the first body counts. Prison officials promised a more accurate death count once all of the bodies had been taken to the fairgrounds. Some 319 men would soon be laid out in long lines, “grim proof of the disaster.” One observer described the bodies as “seared and blackened.” The long horticulture building, “where flowers will be displayed next fall at the fair, was draped in black and blossoms from the state greenhouses.”5
Not surprisingly, some witnesses to the aftermath compared the scene to a battlefield. Many inmates and rescuers had served in the armed forces during the Great War, and would have been familiar with such scenes. According to Captain Tom W. Jones, who aided in the rescue attempt, the “scenes within were worse than anything he witnessed in the [battles of] Argonne or St. Mihiel.” One inmate compared the fire to warfare as “he leaned against a tree for support while his swimming eyes surveyed the sodden corpses.” A fellow convict shouted out, “The War! Don’t try to tell me this was like the war! I seen both, brother, over there we had a chance for our lives. We had two legs and could run if we couldn’t fight. But not here.” One local doctor, a war veteran himself, agreed that the prison yard “resembled an overseas emergency camp in the world war” as he reflected on the many victims “lying there burned to a crisp, while others suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning fumes which affected them like gas attacks” in the late war.6
The bodies’ repose in death offered a glimpse of the victims’ last moments of life. Those with “seared backs revealed how they turned to face to the walls of their cells protecting eyes and faces in vain.” Other victims were found in a crouched position, the so-called pugilist stance, “with arms outstretched in grotesque fighting poses,”7 the result of the contraction of larger muscles from the heat of the fire. In other instances, dying inmates had enough wherewithal to recognize their minutes were numbered and managed to scrawl notes or some type of identification information that could be used in case their fingerprints and faces proved unidentifiable. One doomed convict, a reporter wrote, possessed enough clarity “to seize pencil and paper and scribble as flames crept close.” Stopped midsentence, he only had time to write, “Dear Mother …” The note was found “scorched and water-soaked” as it was pried from “the stiffened fingers of a huge black man. He still held the pencil as he lay under a gray blanket in one of the rows upon the turf of the quadrangles. When the flares set off by the cameramen lighted his ebony countenance, there was not fear visible on it. Only resignation.”8
Inmate Gus Socha must have assumed this was not going to turn out well for him. When found in his cell he had a note pinned to the back of his shirt that read, “Notify John Dee Armory Avenue, Cincinnati.”9 Former blacksmith Theodore Cottrell, doing life for murder, was found among the “blanket swathed victims on the courtyard.” His intuition had been telling him he might die before his time, confiding to a friend the previous Christmas that it “will be my last Christmas here.”10 Of course he might have meant he hoped to escape or be paroled before then.
Much of the immediate postfire activity was centered at the prison hospital. Here the scene was chaotic at best, with doctors responding to emergency call broadcasts from the greater Columbus region. Their main task was to sort through the dead and wounded as each was laid down before them. As soon as a convict was declared dead, the identification number on his prison garb was taken off and matched with prison records to reveal his identity. The victim would then be declared “Checked out.”11
One physician observed the “stream of pitiful forms, some gasping and shrieking, others horribly charred, pouring in and out” of the hospital, succinctly noting to one query, “Those going in are alive; those going out, dead.” One convict was overheard shouting, “Gangway! We’re bringing in my buddy.” But it was obvious the injured man was not going to make it, as “his face in death distorted by his last frantic effort to get a breath of fresh air in the holocaust which took his life.” As four men carried his blanket-wrapped body into the hospital, “onlookers fell away to make room.” A doctor in the hospital corridor checked the victim’s chest “gingerly” for a heartbeat. His stethoscope was silent, and all he could tell the man’s buddy was, “He’s dead.” In prison parlance, the four convicts bawled that he had “gone west,” screaming for vengeance as “another scorched human shell was placed alongside the endless rows of lifeless forms” in the prison courtyard just outside the hospital.12
Reporter Kenneth D. Tooill chronicled the tale of an inmate named “Pete” who was having his “good arm dressed” in the hospital. Pete noted that his other arm had been useless for years, “full of machine gun slugs.” But the “good arm did heroic work last night. It pulled man after man from the blackened cells.” Some were alive, others, such as his buddy, were not. Pete recounted that when he tried to pull his friend from the ruins of
