School Fires

There have been a lot of school fires over the years, not just in the Ozarks, of course, but throughout the rest of the country and no doubt the rest of the world. Building fires of all kinds, not just school fires, were more common a hundred years ago or so because heating systems and electrical wiring systems (if they existed) tended not to be as safe as those we have today. Fires in the olden days also were often more destructive when they did occur because fire fighting techniques were less advanced than they are today. Even in relatively modern times, however, there have been occasional school fires. There have probably been quite a few just here in the Ozarks. I'm familiar with a couple because I was personally affected by them. And neither was caused by faulty equipment.
On Saturday, November 13, 1954, when I was in the third grade at Fair Grove Elementary School, the adjacent high school caught on fire when a vat containing tar exploded while workers were repairing the roof. The fire was contained to one corner of the building long enough for workers and nearby residents to remove much of the classroom equipment and furniture, but the building itself ended up being entirely destroyed. Fair Grove did not have a fire department at the time, and calls to Springfield for help proved futile, because the Springfield department refused to make the 15-mile trek to help its neighboring town. This caused some hard feelings toward Springfield among Fair Grove residents at the time, but from an objective standpoint Springfield's policy of not servicing surrounding communities was understandable. The Willard Fire Department finally responded to Fair Grove's call for help, and although they got there too late to save the building, they were credited with keeping the fire from spreading to surrounding buildings, including the grade school. This incident spurred Fair Grove to organize its own volunteer fire department in the months after the fire.
As an 8-year-old boy, I didn't get caught up in the controversy surrounding the response or lack of response to the fire. I was just fascinated by the fire itself. I remember watching the school burn from my house on the other side of town. Flames shot into the sky and great clouds of black smoke poured into the air. I wanted go across town and get a close-up view of the action, but my mother wouldn't allow it. Later, my dad took me over but by that time the fire was pretty much out, with some smoke still rising from the smoldering ruins. I thought for a while that the fire would mean an unexpected vacation, but, alas, the elementary school building was saved. Only the high school students would have "no school" for the next few days while arrangements were made to hold classes in neighboring churches and other buildings.
About mid-morning on Thursday, January 28, 1982, while I was teaching at Joplin's old Memorial High School, the school building caught on fire when a student ignited some clothes or costumes that were kept by the drama department in some unlocked closets in a hallway on the 2nd floor just off the stage. The arsonist then closed the doors of the closets, which reached clear to the ceiling, allowing the fire to burn through the ceiling and spread into an area separating the 2nd floor from the 3rd floor before it was even discovered. All students were evacuated safely, but it was a close call for some of those in a couple of classrooms located on the 2nd and 3rd floors near the point of ignition. My classroom was on the 2nd floor but on the opposite side of the building. The Joplin Fire Department responded promptly and had the fire under control by noon, although smoke continued to spiral skyward for some time afterward. School was canceled for the rest of that day and the next day, Friday; so we got a little unexpected vacation. The following Monday, school resumed at Parkwood High School, with Parkwood students and teachers going from very early morning (about 6:30 a.m.) until late morning (about 11:30) and then Memorial students and teachers taking over the building from very early afternoon until late afternoon. Each school ran an abbreviated schedule consisting of about five hours' worth of class time for a month or two while the Memorial building was being renovated. Then we moved back "home." I don't recall for sure whether the arsonist was ever caught, but I think maybe he was. I do recall a rumor among the teachers that a kid they usually referred to only as "Freddie the Firebug" was the guilty culprit. He had apparently been caught setting a smaller fire just a week or so earlier.

Grand Opening of the Crescent Hotel

The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, held its grand opening on May 20, 1886. Built as a joint project of the Eureka Improvement Company and the Frisco Railroad, the four-story hotel was elegantly furnished with all the latest advances like elevators, gas lighting, and hot and cold running water. It cost an estimated half million dollars and was hailed as one of the most luxurious resort hotels in the country.
Train loads of people began arriving on May 19 for the gala festivities planned for the grand opening and continued to arrive the next morning, Thursday the 20th. Special cars loaded with passengers came from Little Rock, Springfield, St. Louis and other regional cities. Dignitaries from all across the country attended the event. Among the guests were the governor of Maine and U. S. Judge Parker (the so-called hanging judge).
Throughout the day on Thursday, various bands and uniformed companies played and marched, and the boom of cannon fire punctuated the occasion during a mock battle. The "gaily attired multitudes," said the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, had "a joyous day" under "pleasant skies." After dark, a fireworks display presented "a spectacle of beautiful grandeur," and then a grand ball in the immense dining room of the hotel culminated the day's events. "An elegantly dressed company of ladies and gentlemen danced the hours away to excellent music," said the Springfield Leader. "At a late hour, the tired guests sought the comfort of airy rooms and downy beds."
No other health resort in America, according to the Gazette, offered more comfort to visitors or more curative powers than Eureka Springs, and the growing demand for additional accommodations had resulted in the erection of the Crescent. "The magnificent hotel building is situated on the summit of the Crescent Mountain 600 feet above the Crescent

Springs, towering above the beautiful city of Eureka Springs, and overlooks the cedar brakes and beautiful White River valley on the west and north and the yellow pine forests on the south and east." Speaking of the Ozarks scenery, the Gazette correspondent concluded, "Artists have painted the grandeur and beauty of the mountains, writers have exhausted language in describing their beauty and telling of the rugged hills clothed with their native forests of perpetual verdure, but, withal, it can only be appreciated by being seen."
Accompanying photo is from the May 21, 1886, Little Rock Arkansas Gazette.

Halloween Mischief

The tradition that used to exist in America, especially in small towns across the heartland, of young people playing pranks on Halloween night pretty well expired a number of years ago, and nowadays, with the increase in youth church parties and so forth, even the tradition of going door to door trick or treating has almost gone by the wayside in a lot of places. I understand the parental concern about kids going door to door, especially if you don't know who lives in all the houses. And as far as the mischief-making that teenagers used to engage in, I suppose there was never really any justification for it, although I tend to look back on my own Halloween capers with nostalgia. Most of it was relatively harmless stuff, like soaping windows, but even in that case, the kids were still making work for someone else to have to do. And sometimes, as my post from last week illustrated, the pranks turned out to have serious consequences. Even when no one got hurt, they often resulted in the destruction of property.
On Halloween night in 1920, two boys at Sarcoxie, Missouri, entered a shed where a man stored his automobile so they could prank the car (perhaps soap the windows). When they departed, they left a door to the shed open, and two of the man's horses came into the shed and ate a bunch of wheat he had stored in the building, causing them to founder.
In 1930, two boys lit a fuse to set off a charge of dynamite close to a house near Nixa with the idea of scaring a group of their peers who were having a party at the residence. The two boys started to run, but when they saw that the fuse had ignited a grass fire, they turned back to try to put out the fire and the dynamite exploded when they were still near it. Both boys lost the sight of one eye.
In 1931, in an incident similar to the one I described last week, a thirteen-year-old boy was shot by a law officer at Butterfield as he was playing a prank. He was rushed to a Monett hospital and was expected to recover.
In 1936 at Neosho, a group of boys turned over a man's chicken house. Soon afterward, a different group of boys happened by, and the man came out of his house with a shotgun, thinking it was the same bunch of boys. He ordered them to halt, but one of them started running. The man shot the boy full of buckshot. The boy apparently was not seriously hurt, and charges were not brought against the man.
Those are just a few of the Halloween pranks gone bad that occurred in the Ozarks during the first half of the 20th century. Usually the pranks were confined mostly to soaping windows, toilet-papering trees, throwing trash into the streets, and overturning outhouses, with an occasional broken window. Still, even if nobody got hurt, these types of things still meant that someone other than the pranksters usually had to clean up the mess. So, I guess it's not a bad thing that we don't see a lot of mischief-making on Halloween nowadays.

A Halloween Prank Turns Tragic

During the early 20th century, it was a tradition at Drury College in Springfield for the male students to engage in various campus pranks on Halloween night. The school generally tolerated the tomfoolery as long as it didn't get out of hand, but faculty members were deployed in strategic locations on campus to prevent serious vandalism. Special policemen were also sometimes hired to make sure the student pranks were confined to the campus and to prevent outside trouble-makers from venturing onto the campus.
In 1908, a number of special policeman, including Charles H. Finn, were employed in the lead-up to Halloween and given their instructions. They were told that they need not carry weapons, and Finn said he didn't have a gun anyway. However, he borrowed a pistol from an acquaintance as he headed to the Drury campus on Halloween night. In the wee hours of the morning of November 1, two young men, Calvin Finke and Fred Rowe, were carousing together when Rowe allegedly threw lime on some of the faculty members who were helping guard the campus. Finn chased after the two young men, yelling for them to stop. When they didn't halt, he drew his pistol and fired. The bullet struck Finke, who was the son of one of the faculty members, and he died in the hospital on the morning of November 2.
A coroner's jury found that Finke had died at the hands of Charles Finn and that Finn had fired for no reason. When the incident first happened, Finn had denied even firing the shot. Later he said he drew his pistol with the intention of firing over the boys' heads but that the weapon discharged a lot easier than he expected and he fired accidentally before he'd planned. After he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, he changed his story again, saying that he'd stumbled as he raised the pistol, causing it to fire before he intended.
The charge was reduced to second-degree murder, and Finn went on trial in March of 1909. After testimony was taken, the judge's instructions to the jury included the fact that they could find the defendant guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter. Instead, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty. It was an unpopular decision with a large number of people, including many in the Drury community, and even the judge later denounced the verdict.

The Lynching of Roy Hammonds

After Roy Hammonds, a nineteen-year-old black man, pled guilty on Friday, April 29, 1921, in the Circuit Court of Pike County, Missouri, to attempted assault on a fourteen-year-old white girl, he was assessed a sentence of ten years in the state penitentiary. But that wasn’t enough for the good citizens of Bowling Green. They wanted him to hang.
Not just hang. They wanted him to suffer.
Two days earlier, fourteen-year-old Virginia Terrell had been to a picture show in Bowling Green and was walking home that night past the Negro Methodist Church when she was accosted by a black youth. The assailant dragged her to the rear of the church and started choking her, but the assault was interrupted by the girl’s father and brother, who had started from their home to meet her. Hearing Virginia’s screams, they came running, and the attacker fled.
The girl’s father dashed after the villain, causing the attacker to stumble and lose his cap as he jumped a fence. Regaining his footing, the young man fled through the town square, with the father, who’d been delayed crossing the fence, trailing behind. Sheriff Charles Moore joined the chase, but the fugitive had “gained headway” and managed to elude his pursuers.
Two bloodhounds were brought in and given the scent of the cap that the fugitive had lost. The dogs followed the path of the chase through the square and eventually to the home of Roy Hammonds north of town. Several people were at the house, including Roy’s father, William, and his older brother, Willie.
Based on the dogs’ behavior and the fact that Virginia Terrell had described her attacker as a young black man, twenty-one-year-old Willie Hammonds was arrested on Thursday evening and escorted to jail. The next morning, he was taken before the girl at the prosecutor’s office in Bowling Green, and she identified him as the person who had attacked her. He was returned to the Pike County Jail over his stout protestations.
Shortly afterwards, Sheriff Moore tossed the cap found at the crime scene into Willie’s cell, saying “Here’s your cap.”
“That’s not my cap,” Willie said. “That’s Roy’s cap.”
William Hammonds, father of the two young men, confirmed that the cap belonged to Roy, but Roy claimed Willie had been wearing it on the night of the attack. Confronted by his brother, Roy finally admitted he had been wearing it. Both the sons were then taken before the girl, and she hesitantly picked out Roy as her attacker.
Roy then confessed and was tossed in jail. He admitted asking the girl to take off her clothes but she refused. That was all he did, because the two men came up and he ran. His confession was reported as a written statement, but part of the statement was that he couldn’t read and write. The confession was, in fact, transcribed by the prosecutor, and parts of it were obviously prepared ahead of time, such as an assurance that the statement was made of Hammonds’s “own volition” without coercion from law officers.
Taken into court that same afternoon for a preliminary hearing, Roy pled guilty to assault and was sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary.
Hundreds of people had flocked into Bowling Green from the countryside on Friday morning, and feelings against Hammonds ran high throughout the day. There were whisperings of vigilantism even before the hearing, and after verdict was announced, talk of a lynching reached a fever pitch. Many in the community thought ten years in the can was not enough punishment for a black man who dared assault a young white girl.
Aware of the rumors of mob violence, Sheriff Moore decided to give the would-be vigilantes the slip. He put out the word that he planned to wait until Sunday to transfer Hammonds to the state prison when his real plan was to get the prisoner out of Bowling Green as soon as possible.
About dusk, Moore and six deputies spirited Hammonds to a railroad station about a mile west of Bowling Green with the intention of boarding the 7:15 p.m. train for Mexico, Missouri, and on to Jefferson City. But somehow the lynch-happy crowd got wind of the ruse, and a mob formed at the depot before the westbound train showed up.
When the train got there, the mob forced the crew to go on without picking anybody up. They then wrested Moore’s prisoner away and took him to a tree about a mile west of the depot, where they hanged him to a large limb. The vengeful mob cruelly treated the young man, purposely leaving his arms and legs unbound so he would be “permitted to fight for his life” once he was dangling in the air. Hammonds reached above his head to grasp the rope and raise his body up to prevent strangulation. Finally growing exhausted after about fifteen minutes, he gave up and slowly strangled to death.
As usual, only token efforts were made to identify and prosecute the lynchers.
This entry is condensed from a chapter in my Yanked Into Eternity book.