Victims
Estimates of the number killed by the collapse and subsequent fire vary from 90 to 145. Most were recent immigrants, either Irish or Scots, many of them young women. A 2002 fictionalization of the disaster recounted:
Flames spread rapidly, and now terror of fire threatened those waiting to be saved. Mary Bannon, pinned in the wreckage, handed her pay envelope to the friend comforting her and asked that it get to her father. 'Bid him goodbye for me,' she said, 'You will be saved; I will not'.
While Irish and Scots were the majority, the list of the Pemberton Mill's casualties is indicative of New England’s labor force at that time. There were also Yankees from Maine and New Hampshire, immigrants from Germany and Switzerland, and others. All the churches of Lawrence — Baptists, Catholic, Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Universalist — had parishioners to console after the disaster.
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Famous quotes containing the word victims:
“Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Alas! regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come
Nor care beyond today.”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
“When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)