100th Anniversary Of Capitol Building Fire In Albany, New York

ALBANY -- The fire started in the Assembly Library and quickly spread down
the hall to the nearby New York State Library, finding plenty of fuel among
towering shelves jammed with books and cabinets filled with hundreds of
thousands of documents, many of them centuries old. It would be several days
before firefighters finally doused the last embers of the state Capitol fire
that started in the early morning hours of March 29, 1911. Meanwhile, one
man was dead and an untold wealth of New York's history and heritage -- from
Dutch colonial records to priceless Iroquois artifacts -- had gone up in
flames. The disaster, according to the man who served as the State Library's
director before and after the fire, was unequaled in the history of modern
libraries. The fire is estimated to have destroyed about 500,000 books and
300,000 manuscripts; only 7,000 books and 80,000 manuscripts were saved. The
blaze also destroyed 8,500 artifacts in the New York State Museum, including
irreplaceable Seneca Indian craftworks. The Capitol blaze, coming just four
days after the horrific fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. factory in
Manhattan, was the second blow in a pair of pyrotechnic disasters that led
to legislation in Albany strengthening building codes and factory safety
laws statewide, and eventually, nationwide. New York is marking this week's
100th anniversary of the Capitol fire with an exhibit, a new documentary
film, a newly published book and public lectures by state librarians and
historians. Few realize the extent of the disaster of 1911," James I. Wyer,
director of the State Library from 1908-1938, told the New York Post three
years after the blaze engulfed the entire western portion of the Capitol,
built in the French Renaissance style over a 32-year period and completed
just a dozen years before the fire. Joseph Gavit, the "Superintendent of the
Stacks" whose 50-year career at the State Library started in 1896, staunchly
believed the fire was started by careless smoking during a boozy party held
in a room near the Assembly chamber, according to state librarians Paul
Mercer and Vicki Weiss, co-authors of "The New York State Capitol and The
Great Fire of 1911. Officially, the blame was laid on faulty wiring. What
isn't disputed is that the blaze ignited around 2 a.m. in what was then the
Assembly's third-floor library, just down the hall from the speaker's
office. During a recent tour of the third and fourth floors, Capitol
Architect James Jamieson described how the fire spread through the chamber's
library, where it intensified and blew out the tall windows overlooking one
of the roofless interior courtyards designed to provide natural light and
ventilation. That courtyard, along with another nearby and some elevator
shafts, wound up acting as conduits for flames that jumped over ceiling
spaces and engulfed the State Library, he said. Since it's all intertwined,
the fire would just find all these places to go," Jamieson explained. Once
the flames reached the library, there was no hope of stopping them. More
than half a million books were stacked floor to ceiling on pine shelves.
Catalogues, newspapers, old manuscripts, journals, wooden desks and
tables -- all served as fuel. The heat was so intense it melted some of the
building's red sandstone columns that were quarried in Scotland, Jamieson
said. Wind currents created by the fires spewed charred pieces of paper
through blown-out windows, littering surrounding streets as if a parade had
been held. The first alarm didn't arrive at the Albany Fire Department until
2:40 a.m. About 150 firefighters battled for hours before getting the
conflagration under control, although debris would smolder for days. Gavit
and others risked their lives running among the still-burning corridors to
save books and documents. Among some of the important documents saved: the
original manuscript of George Washington's farewell address and an original
Emancipation Proclamation, written in Abraham Lincoln's own hand. Arthur
Parker, the first archaeologist hired by New York state, dashed among the
State Museum's display cases arrayed on the fourth floor, wielding a
tomahawk passed down from a Seneca ancestor and using it as a fire ax as he
rescued priceless Iroquois artifacts. He managed to save only about 50 out
of about 500 Iroquois relics, said Betty Duggan, a State Museum curator. He
was just heart-sickened by the fire," Duggan said. News of the fire soon
reached many of the far-flung graduates of the New York State Library
School, founded by Melvil Dewey and located in the Capitol's northwest
tower. For some, the destruction of so much written knowledge was like a
death in the family, and the letters and telegrams they sent to Albany bore
condolences from around the globe. The chief librarian at the Imperial
University of Tokyo wrote: "I beg to express my deepest sympathy for the
loss of the New York State Library by the recent fire. It took a year to
rebuild and repair the damaged sections of the Capitol. Workers removed much
of the soot from the scorched, blackened sandstone walls, but it wasn't
until a two-year, $2.4 million restoration project completed in 2006 that
the Capitol's Great Western Staircase was returned to its pre-fire
condition. The Capitol fire is still haunting us," said Nancy Kelley,
exhibit planner for the State Museum, where a three-month exhibit on the
fire runs through June 18. One-hundred years later, we're still dealing with
the fire. There's also some real haunting, according to Capitol lore. The
ghost of Samuel Abbott, the disaster's sole human casualty, is said to haunt
the Capitol's fourth floor, where the body of the 78-year-old night watchman
was found. While some say Abbott's spirit still makes his nightly rounds,
researchers and librarians often come across more tangible remnants of the
fire among the files and volumes at the State Library and State Archives:
documents charred around the edges or shriveled from being doused. Experts
at the State Archives still work to conserve 20,000 documents rescued from
the fire. They range from such historic items as the Flushing Remonstrance,
a 350-year-old Dutch document demanding religious freedom, to a
Revolutionary War soldier's appeal to be allowed to remarry, written after
he had returned home to find his wife had joined the Shaker religious sect
and no longer wanted a husband. There are lots of small stories to tell from
these documents," said Sue Bove, a conservation expert at the State
Archives. They may not be glamorous, but they're a source of information on
what our forefathers had to endure. Another item saved from the blaze is a
page, circa 1675, from a wealthy Dutch woman's account with an Albany baker.
The entry shows a purchase of "Sinterklaas" goodies. Mercer and Weiss
believe it could be the earliest record of the celebration of the feast of
Saint Nicholas -- aka Santa Claus -- in the New World.