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Newhall House fire of 1883
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Artists' depiction of Newhall House Fire from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
The Newhall House of Milwaukee was built in 1857. It was a 6-story wooden hotel that could hold 300 guests and was considered one of the largest hotels in the West at the time. It stood on the northwest corner of Broadway (then Main) and Michigan Streets. Stockholders of the hotel were among Milwaukee's most prominent citizens, including Alexander Mitchell, C.D. Nash, and Daniel Wells.
It was about 4 o'clock in the morning on January 10, 1883 smoke was seen coming from the upper floor. The fire was suspected to have started in the elevator shaft. When the alarm was sounded, most of the Fire Department was already fighting a fire on 18th and Vliet Streets.
Before any fire equipment arrived the upper part of the south front of the building was ablaze. People on the street were horrified to see the hotel's windows filled with struggling guests, screaming for help.
Someone, seeing a reflection of the fire elsewhere, turned in an alarm from a call box located on East Water and Division Streets. This caused the lost of one steam fire engine for 10 minutes while the fire was at its worst.
Hotel residents began jumping from the windows. At least a dozen leaped from the Michigan Street side, resulting in death or shattered limbs. In the alley, the bodies of seven servant women were found in the snow where they must have writhed in agony from broken limbs until they died. Many leapers ended up striking the telegraph wires that surrounded the building; some were cut deeply by the wires, while others hit the wires and were sprung back into the air before crashing to the ground.
Among the guests who were saved was General Tom Thumb and his wife of P.T. Barnum fame.
One act of heroism was when Herman Stauss, fireman from Truck No. 1, gained the roof of a building across the alley with a ladder. With the help of a bystander, they dropped the ladder, where it crashed into the window of the fifth floor of the Newhall House. Twelve serving girls were rescued, carried over the precarious bridge, one in a dead faint.
In less then half an hour the Newhall House was consumed. At least 71 (some reports put the number upwards of 90) of the 300 people in the hotel perished.
Because of the intensity of the fire, 43 people were never identified. A monument memorializing the victims of the fire was erected at Forest Home Cemetery.
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