Blame for Augusta’s 1916 fire shared

March 20--You'd think after 100 years, we'd know what started the greatest fire in Augusta history.

We don't.

You'd think that anything that led to the destruction of 35 city blocks, caused millions of dollars in damage and left 3,000 people homeless would be cited as an example of criminal negligence.

It wasn't.

You'd think the persons responsible would have faced the full penalty of the law.

They didn't.

One hundred years after the March 22, 1916, blaze, we have dozens of amazing photos of an inferno and its aftermath. We have many eyewitness accounts; we have newspaper clippings and insurance company records and 10 decades of Augusta family anecdotes.

But we have only one mystery -- what started it?

PHOTOS: Browse photos from the devastating 1916 Fire

Most histories blame an electric iron left unattended in Kelly's Dry-Goods store in the Dyer Building at Eighth and Broad streets.

That's as good an explanation as any, and it fits what we know of the events that followed that windy Wednes­day in March 1916. But it doesn't explain why it took almost 42 years for the iron to get noticed.

Our suspect household appliance made its debut in an Augusta Chronicle feature story in July 1958 written by longtime newspaperman John F. Battle. Considered an expert on the history of Augusta firefighting, Battle almost matter-of-factly mentions for the first time that an electric iron was the culprit. He attributed this information to unnamed firemen. He did not explain why no one seemed to find this worth reporting for four decades.

A more scholarly investigation into the fire source took place in the 1970s when the Augusta College history depart­ment reviewed the files of the Augusta City Coun­cil, as well as many newspaper accounts, hunting for the fire starter. The best they could find was an account in the Macon News that said the fire began in "a pile of rubbish on the ground floor of a store." Again, no attribution nor public record cited.

THE CAUSE: While we still might not know for sure what started Augusta's 1916 fire, we do know what caused it.

Within days of the blaze, Au­gusta Fire Chief Frank G. Rey­nolds issued a scathing report to the public printed at length in The Chronicle. Many of the things that caused the fire were later supported in insurance investigations.

Top on the list was wood: the heavy use of wooden buildings in Augusta; the pervasive use of wooden shingles; zoning laws or lack thereof that would allow fancy brick facades on the front of a street, but tacky wooden framing behind it, what Reynolds termed "lax building laws."

Reynolds also called the 30-year-old Dyer Building "a fire trap." He said its use of stairwells around an elevator shaft turned the business building into an architectural fireplace and chimney. Once the fire started, there was almost no way to stop it.

Reynolds not only seemed to realize this immediately that night, but he also responded just as quickly. He ordered his men out of the blazing Dyer and asked that firefighters from other Geor­gia and South Carolina cities be called in. Augusta was going to need help because any large fire would be hard to stop.

This was no surprise to Rey­nolds, who had spent much of the previous year trying to get the attention of Augusta and its civic leadership to improve fire safety. The Chronicle archives of 1915 show Reynolds making many public inspections of schools, advocating better fire escapes.

He also began 1916 with a plea to the Augusta City Coun­cil for a new fire engine -- motorized, not horse-drawn, he said. Not only did the city deny his request, but it also cut Reynolds' salary 10 percent. Budget cutbacks, he was told.

Reynolds said nothing of these snubs in his report days after the fire. He did mention many other problems, including the city's inadequate water pressure, which dropped quickly as the fire began and stayed low in the hours that followed. Maybe that wouldn't have mattered.

Firefighters arriving from Greenville and Charleston, S.C., and Macon, Waynesboro, Atlanta and Savannah, Ga., couldn't use the thousands of feet of firehose they brought with them, because their firehose couplings were incompatible with Augusta's system.

Then there was the wind.

The Chronicle's published weather accounts don't seem to corroborate what so many people remember that day. Erick Mont­gomery, of His­to­ric Augusta, said he has heard accounts of 50 mph gusts, but that seems unlikely. There was, however, something blowing fiercely that night. The pages of singed Augusta hymn books were said to have been found across the river in South Caro­lina.

The wind blew sparks from one wooden roof to another, creeping slowly east and consuming 541 dwellings and 141 business buildings. Among them were St. Paul's historic old church and the Tubman School for girls, the "fireproof" Augusta Chronicle building and many fine old homes in Augusta's oldest residential neighborhood.

The financial toll was $4.25 million. In today's dollars, that's about $100 million.

THE REAL CULPRIT: Augusta has long used the Great Fire of 1916 as an example of a successful civic challenge. The old town on the Savan­nah River rose to the occasion, the story goes, and came back bigger and grander than ever.

Within 20 years, the downtown was rebuilt and thriving, and a new golf tournament at the private club on Wash­ington Road was gaining national notice. A federal dam would soon tame the river. The Army would grow a fort. A nuclear weapons plant would boost the region.

Few would remember that the city's civic leadership had proven so short-sighted in the years and months leading to and beyond March 22, 1916.

One who didn't was Louis Harris, Augusta's famous newsman and highly honored editor of The Chronicle. After the Augusta College history department's scrutiny of the fire was made public, Harris could not hide his contempt.

Writing on the editorial page in May 1974, he pointed out that city council minutes of February and March 1916 showed a disregard for public safety by failing to curb the use of wooden shingles.

He mocked Mayor James R. Littleton's objection -- five weeks after the fire -- to buying new fire engines, by offering this mayoral rationale: "I do not believe that we need any."

Perhaps most damning, Har­ris said, was the myopic lack of focus by the city council when it met just five days after the most devastating disaster in the city's history. Its first order of business on March 27, 1916?

"Discussing the legality of poultry running loose on streets within the city limits."

"Not long ago," Harris wrote, "when someone asked me to define Augusta in one sentence, I offered this: A city wherein lives some of the finest and most generous people I have ever known, and some of the least capable politicians I have ever met."

Harris said what saved Augus­ta a hundred years ago were its good private citizens, not its political leaders.

"History generally proves itself to be an excellent teacher," Harris wrote, "if we are only willing to accept it as such."

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