Fire
On April 21, 1930, a major fire killed 322 inmates and seriously injured 150. The fire is the deadliest prison fire in United States history. A cordon of penitentiary guards was thrown about the towering prison walls. Other squads took up vantage points in guard towers and by this time 500 soldiers from Fort Hayes, local military post, were on the scene. Machine guns were mounted at the gates and on the walls. Bayonets were fixed and the troopers were ordered to shoot to kill. A troop of National Guardsmen soon augmented the regulars, and 30 minutes after the fire started the prison was completely surrounded.
The incident was the subject of Chester Himes' (an inmate at the time) story To What Red Hell (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone—later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998).
Read more about this topic: Ohio Penitentiary
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“Men, you are all marksmen—don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
—Israel Putnam (1718–1790)
“And she’d had lucky eyes and a high heart,
And wisdom that caught fire like the dried flax,
At need, and made her beautiful and fierce,
Sudden and laughing.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;”
—Harry Graham (1874–1936)