THE FIRE: AN INTERLUDE
On the morning of March 17, 1914, College Hall, the oldest and
largest building on the Wellesley campus, was destroyed by fire.
No one knows how the fire originated; no one knows who first
discovered it. Several people, in the upper part of the house,
seem to have been awakened at about the same time by the smoke,
and all acted with clear-headed promptness. The night was thick
with fog, and the little wind "that heralds the dawn" was not strong
enough to disperse the heavy vapors, else havoc indeed might have
been wrought throughout the campus and the sleeping village.
At about half past four o'clock, two students at the west end of
College Hall, on the fourth floor, were awakened and saw a fiery
glow reflected in their transom. Getting up to investigate, they
found the fire burning in the zoological laboratory across the
corridor, and one of them immediately set out to warn Miss Tufts,
the registrar, and Miss Davis, the Director of the Halls of
Residence, both of whom lived in the building; the other girl
hurried off to find the indoor watchman. At the same time, a
third girl rang the great Japanese bell in the third floor center.
In less than ten minutes after this, every student was out of
the building.
The story of that brief ten minutes is packed with self-control
and selflessness; trained muscles and minds and souls responded
to the emergency with an automatic efficiency well-nigh unbelievable.
Miss Tufts sent the alarm to the president, and then went to the
rooms of the faculty on the third floor and to the officers of the
Domestic Department on the second floor. Miss Davis set a girl
to ringing the fast-fire alarm. And down the four long wooden
staircases the girls in kimonos and greatcoats came trooping,
each one on the staircase she had been drilled to use, after she
had left her room with its light burning and its corridor door shut.
In the first floor center the fire lieutenants called the roll of
the fire squads, and reported to Miss Davis, who, to make assurance
doubly sure, had the roll called a second time. No one said the
word "fire"--this would have been against the rules of the drill.
For a brief space there was no sound but "the ominous one of
falling heavy brands." When Miss Davis gave the order to go out,
the students walked quietly across the center, with embers and
sparks falling about them, and went out on the north side through
the two long windows at the sides of the front door.
And all this in ten minutes!
Meanwhile, Professor Calkins, who does not live at the college
but had happened to spend the night in the Psychology office on
the fifth floor, had been one of the earliest to awake, had wakened
other members of the faculty and helped Professor Case and her
wheel-chair to the first floor, and also had sent a man with an ax
to break in Professor Irvine's door, which was locked. As it
happened, Professor Irvine was spending the night in Cambridge,
and her room was not occupied. Most of the members of the faculty
seem to have come out of the building as soon as the students did,
but two or three, in the east end away from the fire, lingered to
save a very few of their smaller possessions.
The students, once out, were not allowed to re-enter the building,
and they did not attempt to disobey, but formed a long fire line
which was soon lengthened by girls from other dormitories and
extended from the front of College Hall to the library. Very
few things above the first floor were saved, but many books,
pictures, and papers went down this long line of students to find
temporary shelter in the basement of the library. Associate
Professor Shackford, who wrote the account of the fire in the
College News, from which these details are taken, tells us how
Miss Pendleton, patrolling this busy fire line and questioning the
half-clad workers, was met with the immediate response, even from
those who were still barefooted, "I'm perfectly comfortable,
Miss Pendleton", "I'm perfectly all right, Miss Pendleton." Miss
Shackford adds:
"At about five o'clock, a person coming from the hill saw
College Hall burning between the dining-room and Center,
apparently from the third floor up to the roof, in high, clear
flames with very little smoke. Suddenly the whole top seemed
to catch fire at once, and the blaze rushed downward and upward,
leaping in the dull gray atmosphere of a foggy morning. With
a terrific crash the roof fell in, and soon every window in the
front of College Hall was filled with roaring flames, surging
toward the east, framed in the dark red brick wall which served
to accentuate the lurid glow that had seized and held a building
almost one eighth of a mile long. The roar of devastating fury,
the crackle of brands, the smell of burning wood and melting iron,
filled the air, but almost no sound came from the human beings who
saw the irrepressible blaze consume everything but the brick walls.
"The old library and the chapel were soon filled with great billows
of flame, which, finding more space for action, made a spectacle
of majestic but awful splendor. Eddies of fire crept along the
black-walnut bookcases, and all that dark framework of our beloved
old library. By great strides the blaze advanced, until innumerable
curling, writhing flames were rioting all through a spot always
hushed 'in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.' The
fire raged across the walls, in and around the sides and the
beautiful curving tops of the windows that for so many springs
and summers had framed spaces of green grass on which fitful
shadows had fallen, to be dreamed over by generations of students.
In the chapel, tremendous waves swelled and glowed, reaching
almost from floor to ceiling, as they erased the texts from the
walls, demolished the stained-glass windows, defaced, but did not
completely destroy the college motto graven over them, and, in
convulsive gusts swept from end to end of the chapel, pouring in
and out of the windows in brilliant light and color. Seen from
the campus below, the burning east end of the building loomed up
magnificent even in the havoc and desolation it was suffering."
At half past eight o'clock, four hours after the first alarm was
sounded, there stood on the hill above the lake, bare, roofless
walls and sky-filled arches as august as any medieval castle
of Europe. Like Thomas the Rhymer, they had spent the night
in fairyland, and waked a thousand years old. Romance already
whispered through their dismantled, endless aisles. King Arthur's
castle of Camelot was not more remote from to-day than College Hall
from the twentieth-century March morning. Weeks, months, a little
while it stood there, vanishing--like old enchanted Merlin--into
the impenetrable prison of the air. There will be other houses
on that hilltop, but never one so permanent as the dear house
invisible; the double Latin cross, the ten granite columns, the
Center ever green with ageless palms, the "steadfast crosses,
ever pointing the heavenward way",--to eyes that see, these have
never disappeared.
At half past eight o'clock, in the crowded college chapel, President
Pendleton was saying to her dazed and stricken flock, "We know
that all things work together for good to them that love God,--who
shall separate us from the love of Christ?" And when she had
given thanks, in prayer, for so many lives all blessedly safe,
there came the announcement, so quiet, so startling, that the
spring term would begin on April 7, the date already set in the
college calendar. This was the voice of one who actually believed
that faith would remove mountains. And it did. By the faith of
President Pendleton, Wellesley College is alive to-day. She did
literally and actually cast the mountain into the sea on that
seventeenth of March, 1914. St. Patrick himself never achieved
a greater miracle.
She knew that two hundred and sixteen people were houseless;
that the departments of Zoology, Geology, Physics, and Psychology,
had lost their laboratories, their equipment, their lecture rooms;
that twenty-eight recitation rooms, all the administrative offices,
the offices of twenty departments, the assembly hall, the study
hall, had all been swept away. Yet, in a little less than three
weeks, there had sprung up on the campus a temporary building
containing twenty-nine lecture and recitation rooms, thirteen
department offices, fifteen administrative offices, three dressing
rooms, and a reception room. Plumbing, steam heat, electricity,
and telephone service had been installed. A week after college
opened for the spring term, classes were meeting in the new building.
During that first week, offices and classes had been scattered all
over the campus,--in the Society houses, in the basements of
dormitories, the Art Building, the Chemistry Building, the Gymnasium,
the basement of the Library, the Observatory, the Stone Hall Botany
Laboratories, Billings Hall; all had opened their doors wide. The
two hundred and sixteen residents of old College Hall had all been
housed on the campus; it meant doubling up in single rooms, but
the doublets persuaded themselves and the rest of the college
that it was a lark.
This spirit of helpfulness and cheer began on the day of the fire,
and seems to have acquired added momentum with the passing months.
Clothes, books, money, were loaned as a matter of course. By
half past nine o'clock in the morning, the secretary of the dean
had written out from memory the long schedule of the June examinations,
to be posted at the beginning of the spring term. Members of
the faculty were conducting a systematic search for salvage among
the articles that had been dumped temporarily in the "Barn" and the
library; homes had been found for the houseless teachers, most
of whom had lost everything they possessed; several members of
the faculty had no permanent home but the college, and their worldly
goods were stored in the attic from which nothing could be saved.
It is said that when President Pendleton, in chapel, told the
students to go home as soon as they had collected their possessions,
"an unmistakable ripple of girlish laughter ran through the
dispossessed congregation." This was the Franciscan spirit in
which Wellesley women took their personal losses. For the general
losses, all mourned together, but with hope and courage. In the
Department of Physics, all the beautiful instruments which Professor
Whiting had been so wisely and lovingly procuring, since she first
began to equip her student-laboratory in 1878, were swept away;
Geology and Psychology suffered only less; but the most harrowing
losses were those in the Department of Zoology, where, besides
the destruction of laboratories and instruments, and the special
library presented to the department by Professor Emeritus Mary A.
Willcox, "the fruits of years of special research work which had
attracted international attention have been destroyed.... Professor
Marion Hubbard had devoted her energies for six years to research
in variation and heredity in beetles.... In view of the increasing
interest in eugenics, scientists awaited the results with keen
anticipation, but all the specimens, notes, and apparatus were
swept away." Professor Robertson, the head of the department,
who is an authority on certain deep-sea forms of life, had just
finished her report on the collections from the dredging expedition
of the Prince of Monaco, which had been sent her for identification;
and the report and the collections all were lost.
Among the few things saved were some of the ivies and the roses
which the classes had planted year by year; these the fire had not
injured; and a slip from the great wistaria vine on the south side
of College Hall has proved to be alive and vigorous. The alumnae
gavel and the historic Tree Day spade were also unharmed. But
that no life was lost outweighs all the other losses, and this was
due to the fire drill which, in one form or another, has been
carried on at Wellesley since the earliest years of the college.
Doctor Edward Abbott, writing of Wellesley in Harper's Magazine
for August, 1876, says:
"Whoever heard of a fire brigade manned by women? There is one at
Wellesley, for it is believed that however incombustible the
college building may be, the students should be taught to put out
fire,... and be trained to presence of mind and familiarity with
the thought of what ought to be done in case of fire." From time
to time the drill has been strengthened and changed in detail, but
in 1902, when Miss Olive Davis, Director of Houses of Residence,
was appointed by Miss Hazard to be responsible for an efficient
fire drill, the modern system was instituted. An article in
College News explains that "the organization of the present
fire-drill system is much like the old one. With the adoption of
Student Government, it was put into the hands of the students.
Each year a fire chief is elected from the student-body, by the
students. This girl is a senior. She is counted an officer of
the Student Government Association, and is responsible to Miss Davis.
Then at meetings held at the beginning of the fall term, each
dormitory elects one fire captain, who in turn appoints lieutenants
under her,--one for every twenty or twenty-five girls.
"The directions for a fire drill are:
"Upon hearing the alarm (five rings of the house bell),
"1. Close your windows, doors, and transoms.
"2. Turn on the electric lights.
"3. March in single file, and as quickly as possible, downstairs,
and answer to your roll call.
"Each lieutenant is responsible for all the girls on her list.
After the ringing of the alarm, she must look into every room
in her district and see that the directions have been complied
with and the inmates have gone downstairs. If the windows and
doors have not been shut, she must shut them. Then she goes
downstairs and calls her roll (some lieutenants memorize their
lists). When the lieutenants have finished, the captain calls
the roll of the lieutenants, asking for the number absent in each
district, and the number of windows and doors left open or lights
not lighted, if any.
"The captains are required to hold two drills a month. At the
regular meetings of the organization at which the fire chief
presides and Miss Davis is often present, the captains report the
dates of their drills, the time of day they were held, the number
of absentees and their reasons, the time required to empty the
building, and the order observed by the girls.
"Drills may be called by the captain at any time of the day or
night. Frequently there were drills at College Hall when it was
crowded with nonresident students, there for classes. In that
case no roll was called, but merely the time required and the
order reported. The penalty for non-attendance at fire drills
is a fine of fifty cents, and a serious error credited to the absentee.
"There are devices such as blocking some of the staircases to train
the girls for an emergency. It was being planned, just about the
time College Hall burned, to have a fire drill there with artificial
smoke, to test the girls. The system is still being constantly
changed and improved. On Miss Davis's desk, the night of the
fire, was the rough draft of a plan by which property could be
better saved in case of fire, without more danger to life."
A few weeks after the burning of College Hall, a small fire broke
out at the Zeta Alpha House, but was immediately quenched, and
Associate Professor Josephine H. Batchelder, of the class of 1896,
writing in College News of the self-control of the students, says:
"Perhaps the best example of 'Wellesley discipline since the fire,'
occurred during the brief excitement occasioned by the Zeta Alpha
House fire. A few days before this, a special plea had been made
for good order and concentrated work in an overcrowded laboratory,
where forty-six students, two divisions, were obliged to meet at
the same time. On this morning, the professor looked up suddenly
at sounds of commotion outside. 'Why, there's a fire-engine going
back to the village!' she said. 'Oh, yes' responded a girl near
the window. 'We saw it come up some time ago, but you were busy
at the blackboard, so we didn't disturb you.' The professor looked
over her roomful of students quietly at work. 'Well,' she said,
'I've heard a good deal of boasting about various things the girls
were doing. Now I'm going to begin!'"
And this self-control does not fail as the months pass. The
temporary administration building, which the students have dubbed
the Hencoop, tests the good temper of every member of the college.
Like Chaucer's wicker House of Rumors it is riddled with vagrant
noises, but as it does not whirl about upon its base, it lacks the
sanitary ventilating qualities of its dizzy prototype. On the
south it is exposed to the composite, unmuted discords of Music Hall;
on the north, the busy motors ply; within, nineteen of the twenty-six
academic departments of the college conduct their classes, between
walls so thin that every classroom may hear, if it will, the
recitations to right of it, recitations to left of it, recitations
across the corridor, volley and thunder. Though they all
conscientiously try to roar as gently as any sucking dove. The
effect upon the unconcentrated mind is something like--The cosine
of X plus the ewig weibliche makes the difference between the
message of Carlyle and that of Matthew Arnold antedate the Bergsonian
theory of the elan vital minus the sine of Y since Barbarians,
Philistines and Populace make up the eternal flux wo die citronen
bluhn--but fortunately the Wellesley mind does concentrate, and
uncomplainingly. The students are working in these murmurous
classrooms with a new seriousness and a devotion which disregard
all petty inconveniences and obstacles.
And the fire has kindled a flame of friendliness between faculty
and students; it has burned away the artificial pedagogic barriers
and quickened human relations. The flames were not quenched
before the students had begun to plan to help in the crippled
courses of study. They put themselves at the disposal of the
faculty for all sorts of work; they offered their notes, their own
books; they drew maps; they mounted specimens on slides for the
Department of Zoology. In that crowded, noisy, one-story building
there are not merely the teachers and the taught, but a body of
tried friends, moving shoulder to shoulder on pilgrimage to truth.