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By the time Baldwin and Little had retrieved the keys from Watkinson, it was clear that the source of the fire was in the wooden form work in the adjacent I&K blocks, which were undergoing construction. When they got through the gate, the guards parceled out the keys to convicts taking part in the rescue efforts, many of whom had come from the E&F dorms. Baldwin and Little reached the third tier and were soon joined by a prisoner, but they couldn’t make it farther than the fourth tier and had to retreat to the second range. Against his better judgment, instead of running outside for air, Little decided to keep up his rescue efforts and began unlocking the second range. As he ran up the second range, he could see the flames above but “couldn’t tell whether they were in the ceiling or in the lumber on top.” It was impossible at that point to ascertain whether the fire was actually in the roof or on top of it because there was only one story separating the roof from the fifth tier under construction in I&K.
Little was able to get everyone out on one side of the second tier. When a “colored” inmate came around, he told him to “get these fellows” out on the other side of the second tier. He went back up to the fourth tier, where he passed out from smoke inhalation and was carried out by Baldwin and three or four inmates. He later lamented, “I was so damned near all in I couldn’t remember…. There was no man in the world who could have got up there at the time we got in the cage, no man, I don’t care who it was.”26 Within five minutes the fire made a decided change. “Oh, it was fast, yes, it come down there, the smoke seemed to come all at once, just come down there in a big billow.” In retrospect, Little and other rescuers regretted not starting at the top and working their way down. This was a moot point, though, since by the time the keys were turned over to Little most of the convicts in the top two tiers were at death’s door.27
It was well documented that none of the G&H cells were opened before 5:45, six minutes after the fire department was officially contacted. Little would later note that by the time he and fellow officer Baldwin began opening cells the smoke was already too intense on the top range to save anyone on tier six. Little and Baldwin were quickly overcome by the dense smoke as they opened the first two tiers of G&H. One convict reported noticing blood trickling out of Little’s nose. Abandoning their efforts for the moment, they passed on cell keys to other convicts, including William Robert Noel from the F Dormitory, who opened the third-range cells.
Baldwin and Little recovered after getting some fresh air out in the yard and returned to aid the rescue efforts in the doomed cellblock. But in the meantime the dense smoke had become even more suffocating. The valiant keepers could go no higher than the fifth tier before retreating. Curiously, some witnesses later reported seeing the two guards on the fourth tier and as high as the sixth, but as with so many other observations, the tumult of the night’s events prevented the substantiation of many statements.
Guards Baldwin and Little, whose presence the warden regarded as a “godsend,” would later testify, as mentioned above, that the warden only took time to shout several cryptic orders to them in the guardroom before disappearing outside. However, as the warden told it, “I told guards to take those keys and go down there.” His badinage with the inquisitors the following day sounded like part of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on First” sketch. When the warden was asked if he had specifically told them what to do when they got down to G&H with the keys, Thomas, obviously losing patience, responded, “Unlock the prisoners; wouldn’t take the keys down there and play with them.” However, both sides would eventually agree that he probably only said, “Get the keys down quickly.”28
While it is uncertain who was actually the first to observe the fire, “it was presumably seen by several at about the same time.” By some accounts “a guard in the tower on the outside wall,” a short distance beyond the north end of the building where the fire originated, was among the first and “called someone at street level who pulled fire alarm box 261, at the head of Dublin St.”29 A day guard named Porter, working near the wagon stockade, testified that he had turned in the fire alarm three times beginning around 5:40 before firing his rifle to get someone’s attention.
It is also conceivable that the fire was first observed by a trustee who was driving back from town to the prison, after running an errand for the warden’s wife, sometime between 5:30 and 5:35. When he noticed smoke outside the cell-house structure, he went to a fire-alarm box and turned in the first fire alarm at exactly 5:39, the time when Columbus fire chief A. R. Nice claimed he received the first alarm from box 261, outside the penitentiary on the corner of Dennison and Dublin Avenues. This clearly contradicted the claim of Liston Schooley in the deputy warden’s office that his friend had notified the fire department around 5:20. Times were logged immediately at the firehouse, making the fire company’s reported times the most reliable. But the time of this first fire alarm was almost twenty minutes later than the times reported by convicts and guards inside the walls. By 5:39 the fire already had an almost half-hour head start. During the subsequent Board of Inquiry that began the day after the fire, Nice declared that all could have been saved if they had been released from cells as soon as fire was discovered. He told the board that “there must have been undue delay because the first alarms came from a box outside the prison walls,” rather than from inside the facility when smoke was first spotted.30
At 5: 40 another alarm was received from the box closest to the penitentiary. After another alarm at 5:42, the fire chief left his home on Gilbert Street and arrived at the Spring Street gate on the corner of Spring and Dennison Streets within seven minutes, where he was met by assistant fire chief Ogburn, who had responded with Company #1. Seeing the fire burning at the north end of the building, Nice, he later testified, turned in the fourth alarm at 6:03, summoning more fire companies to the scene.
Deputy Warden James C. Woodard, who had been on a brief hiatus and was on his way back to the prison when he was alerted to the brewing disaster, arrived close to the same time the fire department did. The warden recalled telling Woodard to “hustle right inside, you take care of the inside and I will take care of the outside.”31 After making sure that prisoners were being released from their cells in G&H, Woodard ordered prisoners from the adjoining E&F dorm to be released as well. As smoke threatened the upper blocks of A&B and C&D, the infamous White City (so named because the interior was painted white), Woodard, fearing that flames might follow, returned to the guardroom, grabbed keys for those blocks and released its inmates into the prison yard.
Woodard was careful to prevent convicts in the so-called Bad Boy Company, Company K, from also being released. To assuage their fears, he told Company K convicts that the fire did not yet pose a threat to them and promised to return and release them if it did.32 Woodard was quite sensitive to claims made later on that some of the K Company convicts actually had been let out of their cells. “While it is said some of them was in the yard, but there wasn’t,” he testified later, explaining that this rumor got started “when a man without clothes went to the commissary and got whatever he could,’ which turned out to be the same “striped shirts and striped coats” worn by K Company.33 For good measure he placed death row prisoners in solitary cells for safety as well.
In the fire’s immediate aftermath, much of the blame for the tragedy would be directed at Warden Thomas, in no small part due to his decision to station himself where he did “to prevent escapes.” To be fair, the warden’s main concern, like that of other big house wardens of the era, was to prevent inmates from escaping at any cost. It was an era when keeping inmates behind bars
