and private autos laden with spirits of ammonia, hoping to revive victims. But upon arrival they could do little to save the injured and dying in the prison yard, so they headed over to the state fairgrounds.
The work of transferring the deceased to the fairgrounds went more slowly than expected. There were only eighteen regulation-sized stretchers available. Using any other type of makeshift conveyance, such as blankets and quilts, could not prevent “bodies from falling apart.”24 As the convicts carried the dead bodies to the trucks from the prison yard, one observer was struck by their “Cries of Gangway,” repeated with “monotonous regularity.” A prisoner who soon after the fire wrote a novel based on his experiences at the Ohio Penitentiary had one of his fictional characters take exception to the way the bodies were handled during transport. “There is nothing nice about the way they are handled. They are hoisted, carried to a truck which has high sides, then flung on the floor in the manner, possibly, that a dealer in hogs would throw his dead purchases into a lorry. One atop another, legs and arms in a jumbled batch, the dead are piled into the truck.” Taking one last look at the trucks as they headed to the fairgrounds, he watched a “receding view of a mass of legs and arms, of blackened faces and tousled hair.”25
It was understood that the transporting of the bodies was supposed to be completed before dawn on Tuesday. Trucks and ambulances carried the lifeless bodies into the fairgrounds under heavy guard, in a process that to some observers resembled the ferrying of casualties from a battlefield. The large army trucks used for transporting the dead had been turned over to the state militia by the federal government shortly after World War I to be utilized as hearses. Few could have imagined they would be used for such a mass casualty event. One local reporter observed that “a caravan of death … rumbled in its grim way through the almost deserted streets of North Columbus early Tuesday morning.” Onlookers were struck by the “olive-drab army trucks looming gray under the garish light of street lamps” as they transported “their gruesome load of freight” from the penitentiary to the fairgrounds, where grieving relatives “braved the chill damp of the night to stand for hours waiting for the dreaded news.”26 The first three trucks, driven by militiamen, delivered their “silent loads” at 1:35 a.m. Each truck transported six bodies. The grim task continued through the small hours before dawn, arriving on what one reporter dubbed “military schedule,” twenty minutes apart. The last of the bodies was removed from the Ohio Penitentiary by 4:14 a.m., making the dawn deadline.27
By Tuesday morning one hundred embalmers and assistants were on duty. Before them were 230 operating tables covered with white sheets, all set up to await the arrival of the motor transport unit transferring the bodies from the prison yard. Several hours before the bodies arrived, a “small army of state employees” had dusted off the tables, all “arranged in orderly rows,” in preparation. A pad of absorbent cotton and other supplies were placed on each table. At the head of each table was a headrest, “a small box, a foot long, a foot wide and about three feet deep.” A reporter noted that “in happier times these little boxes had housed prize apples.”28
Among the embalmers was the All-American Notre Dame football star Jack Cannon, one of the last “bareheaded” college football players, whom the noted sportswriter Grantland Rice would later call the best guard in Notre Dame’s history. A resident of Columbus, Cannon volunteered his services after letting it be known that he had studied embalming in college. He went directly to the Horticulture Building at the state fairgrounds soon after the first body was carried in, helped bring the second victim into the improvised morgue, and immediately set to work.29
Once the bodies arrived, they were rigorously inspected for identification before they were allowed to remain at the fairgrounds. An elaborate checking system was required before bodies could be turned over to relatives. All of the records for the convicts in the G&H cellblocks were relocated from the prison records office to the fairgrounds. To prevent mistakes, Bertillon measurements, prison numbers, and other forms of identification were checked. The potential for misidentification was brought home on Wednesday, when three men previously listed as dead turned up alive, including William Law and Andrew Jackson from Cleveland and one of two Cincinnati brothers.30 One final step was to require all convicts to return to the very cells they had cried to be released from less than forty-eight hours earlier. With close to fifty bodies so charred and disfigured that no forensic tools at the time could identify them, a process of elimination was used. Each of the cells where the fire took place contained the prison numbers of its occupants. Numbers were then checked to see who was unaccounted for. Once this task was completed, the convicts were allowed back out.
Fire survivor “James R. Winning,”31 the anonymous convict turned novelist, claimed in his 1933 roman à clef Behind These Walls that he had been talked into helping with the identification process. His contribution was taking shipping tags from the deputy warden and helping mark the dead in the cells and prison yard. In order to be sure, he needed access to the prisoners’ shirts, which had the numbers written on them. Many were without shirts, however. For those victims who could not be identified he was told to leave behind a blank card. Other victims were so charred they had to be rolled over to pull the shirttail from underneath them. By this time many of the bodies were growing stiff from rigor mortis. Their arms were often sticking straight out, “with the forearm and shoulder forming a pivot so it is impossible, almost, to roll them over.” When he was able to recognize a body, a helper held a flashlight while he wrote down the convict’s number on the tag. “As fast as we tag a group they are carried away.”32
A number of physicians with stethoscopes made sure “life was extinct” before bodies were prepared for burial. Once they were satisfied with the identification, the bodies were turned over to morticians and undertakers, who were busy “working with their fluids and instruments.” Captain C. B. Weir, representing Edward E. Fisher Undertakers, was selected by the state to take charge of the bodies. Weir noted that three hundred suits had been ordered from different stores to clothe the dead for burial. In addition, he mentioned to one reporter that “300 conservative caskets and 300 rough boxes in which caskets will be placed when bodies are buried” had been ordered. Ohio state authorities not only made sure that bodies were properly prepared for burial, but also paid for bodies to be sheathed in black shrouds, white collars, and wing ties,33 placed in plain coffins, and provided transport to their hometowns. Relatives who could not make the trip were permitted to telegraph instructions to the warden.34 After the dead were identified and placed inside their caskets, “some were covered by flowers placed there by friends or relatives.”35 These flowers would stay in place until the floral arrangements donated by the Columbus Flower Growers and Dealers Association arrived.36 One observer described “evenly placed caskets, their lids now closed, gray and pearl and black, a spray of roses and lilies on each one.”37
Undertakers were kept busy throughout the day and by noon on Tuesday, April 22, had finished more than two hundred embalmings. They planned to finish the rest by nightfall. Arrangements had already been made to transfer eight bodies to the Whitaker mortuary for funeral services. Likewise, protocol was in place to make sure all of the Cincinnati victims were returned to their homes for burial. Embalmers from all over central Ohio also worked quickly. The bodies were checked by coroner Murphy.
In the days ahead, sobbing wives, relatives, and friends began the grueling task of identifying hundreds of cadavers. The protocol for claiming the bodies began with a visit to the warden’s office at the Ohio Penitentiary, where next of kin were given passes that would get them into the temporary morgue in the Horticulture Building. Pass in hand, relatives were transported to the fairgrounds, where they waited outside the building until the body had been located, before being taken inside to view it. One reporter described the relatives of the dead men “assembled in droves at the temporary morgue … where victims were
