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:
“For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Do they know they’re old,
These two who are my father and my mother
Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?”
—Elizabeth Jennings (b. 1926)
“I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)