100 year anniversary of Cleveland School fire
It's been 100 years since a deadly fire killed 77 people who were unable to escape a Camden Schoolhouse in 1923.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WOLO)— It’s been 100 years since a deadly fire killed 77 people who were unable to escape a Camden Schoolhouse in 1923.
Governor Henry McMaster and other local officials honored the lives lost at the site where the Cleveland School and Theatre once stood.
According to Chief John Bowers with the Camden Fire Department, the fire was started by an oil lamp that burst on the school’s stage during a play.
Bowers says the fire is considered the deadliest fire in South Carolina history and the National Fire Protection Association reports it as the fourth deadliest fire in U.S. history.
As people scrambled to exit the building, others rushed in to help — making it harder for everyone to escape.
Bowers says the coroner was also killed in the fire, making it even harder to identify those who died.
Sisters Phyllis Wainscott and Pamela Morris say their grandmother survived the fire. Their great uncle however, did not.
“To see the things that my grandmother talked about and to hear the facts that I had no idea it was so.. um… Some of the horrendous things that they actually went through, and the stairwell being so tight and packed. And people being thrown out the windows. Children, many children being saved that I’ve met today…their descendants…who were saved because they were thrown out of a window by an adult,” recalls Phyllis Wainscott along with her sister Pamela Morris.
Ann Seegars lost five family members to the fire.
“My mother in law’s mother, and brother and sister, and sister-in-law and child were all burned at one time. Plus there was other family members too,” says Seegars.
She recalls that her family didn’t speak about that night very often, saying, “I think it was such a tragedy until you would just get some facts, but not the horror of it.”
According to Chief Bowers, the Cleveland School Fire helped change fire codes and laws across the state and the nation.
