University of Virginia Library

I. The Great Fire

If we should be permitted to compare small things with
great, we would venture to say that what the Great Fire
during Nero's reign was to Rome, or the Great Fire during
the reign of Charles The Second was to London, the
Great Fire of 1895 was to the University of Virginia.
It was an episode in the history of that institution so far
beyond the utmost sweep of the normal course of events;
it was so sudden, so unexpected, so startling in its occurrence;
so destructive in its physical consequences; so far
reaching in its moral influence,—that it can, with perfect
accuracy, be taken as a milestone to mark the close
of one period and the opening of another. The University,
after its complete restoration, was not the same
physical entity which it had been before this conflagration.
The Annex had vanished forever in flame and
smoke; the new Rotunda differed in several cardinal features
from the model of the old; and there was a noble
semicircle of new academic buildings,—in exquisite harmony
with the Jeffersonian scheme of edifices,—that shut
off the Lawn from further extention towards the south.
Nor was the University the same moral entity, for no
seat of learning can pass successfully through such a
plunge into calamity without emerging from the black
waters into the sunshine with a spirit purified and lifted
up by the experience of adversity. The catastrophe of

1895 was an appalling one; but the firm resolution with
which it was faced, the practical wisdom with which it was
redressed, the outburst of filial loyalty and affection which
it caused, left behind it the benison of a splendid tradition
of sagacity, courage, and devotion, which seemed, in
its moral influence at least, to be almost a full compensation
for the destructive physical consequences of
that dreadful day.

We have pointed out in our history of anterior periods,
back to the very start, that apprehension of a conflagration
in some one of the pavilions and dormitories, and
even in the Rotunda itself, had always lurked uneasily
in the minds of the officers, and also of the members of
the Faculty. It was as much for the purpose of securing
a supply of water with which to extinguish a possible fire
in these different groups of buildings, as for domestic
uses, that, decade after decade, various measures were
adopted to swell the contents of mountain reservoir, cistern,
and tank, by tapping new fountains and laying down
new and larger connection pipes. There had been many
times when the flames had burst out from dormitory roof
or flooring, or pavilion chimney, but they had been quickly
smothered, and no damage of a serious nature had been
inflicted. As fate as June 12, 1894, an address, signed by
the rector, Dr. W. C. N. Randolph, and the chairman,
Professor William M. Thornton, had been sent to the Society
of Alumni, in which attention was earnestly directed
to the fact that the Rotunda was not a fire-proof structure;
and that, should it be burned down, the collection of
books which it contained,—many of which were of unique
value for their rarity and could not be replaced,—would
inevitably be consumed along with it.

In the course of the first year that followed this farsighted
warning, a thin, wavering wreath of smoke was

descried issuing lazily from the mouth of the ventilator
situated in the cornice at the northwestern end of the
Annex. This was on the 27th of October; the day was
Sunday; and the hour was fifteen minutes after ten o'clock
in the morning. The weather was clear, and there was a
distinct suggestion of autumnal crispness in the air. A
student,—Foshee by name,—returning from a late
breakfast at a neighboring boarding-house, happened to
glance upward as he reached the corner, and at once detected
the smoke, although not yet voluminous enough to
rise skyward in a cloud. Startled and excited by the unexpected
sight, he hallooed to two young men,—Sloan
and Penton, by name,—who were lounging in view; and
when they had run up and seen the smoke, they hurried off
with him to inform Henry Martin, the janitor. Henry,
as usual, was not far from his bell-rope, and before the
almost breathless students could finish speaking, he had
seized it, and with an energy which he had never before
been required to put forth, rang the bell until the protracted
sound had alarmed the University community
from end to end. The first strokes, however, were taken
by all as simply an announcement of the hour for morning
services in the chapel; but the prolonged ringing, followed
by loud cries of fire, caused the young men to swarm out
of their dormitories and rush down the arcades and up
the Lawn to the Rotunda. At their head was Professor
William H. Echols, who, at this time, combined with the
duties of his chair, the general supervision of the buildings
and grounds.

On reaching the main entrance to the Annex, they
found that the door was locked; but quickly staving it in,
they crowded forward into the public hall. Smoke was
already gathering below the high ceiling of this large
apartment, and flame was to be seen playing around the

upper section of the curtain of the platform just at the
spring of the arch. It had eaten its way through the
floor of the engineering drawing-room, which was situated
immediately above the public hall. A flue rose from
a spot behind the great picture, the School of Athens, and
passed the second floor on its way to the roof. The
draught through this conduit had quickened the speed of
the downward advance of the flames. When the drawing-room
above the hall was entered, it was found to be
full of black smoke, although no flames were visible; but
when the door which gave admission to a small instrument-room
through the lath and plaster partition that ran
across the north end of the larger apartment, was broken
in, a dense wave of additional smoke poured out, and the
interior was discovered to be lapped in flames shooting
up between the planking of the ceiled arch that curved
over the stage beneath.

The fire had started in one of the three following areas:
(1) in the closed space between the ceiling of the public
hall and the floor of the instrument-room on the western
side; or (2) in the space,—also closed,—between the
lower and upper surfaces of the arch above the stage; or
(3) in the closed space lying between this arch and the
partition which shut off the eastern end of the west gallery.
The last fire that had been lighted in the public hall
had been extinguished two complete days before. This
fire had been in the stoves which were used to heat that
apartment, and there had been none in the basement flues
at any time during the previous eighteen hours. As the
instrument-room had been cleaned up from end to end
during the preceding summer, there was no tenable
ground for attributing the conflagration to spontaneous
combustion among rotting materials stored within its
walls. There had been noticed, not long before the fire

burst out, vagaries on the part of the electric light, and
it was afterwards conjectured that the origin of the conflagration
lay in some unaccountable disadjustment of the
wires.[1]

When the young men made the first rush from the
dormitories, some of them had the forethought to pull
along after them the college engine and reels. There
was a small pond or water-hole situated about fifty yards
to the west of the Annex; but no advantage could be taken
of it owing to the absence of a suction pipe. The hose,
having been quickly joined on to the nearest plug, was
dragged, by way of a pair of backstairs, up to the platform
of the public hall. Unfortunately for the salvation
of the building, the stream which the nozzle could
throw at that height above the water-mains did not exceed
four or five feet in length, which signified that it did not
have sufficient head to reach the ceiling. In the meanwhile,
an attempt to form a bucket-brigade in the drawing-room
above the public hall had been thwarted by the
massive cloud of smoke. While Professor Echols and his
equally brave and faithful assistants were vainly endeavoring
to check the spread of the flames southward along
the public hall ceiling, the lights and reflectors situated
just at the edge of the stage, fell, with a terrific crash,
to the floor. This had happened because the fire had
burned through the beam which held them up and left
them without support. Professor Echols, who was
standing upon a ladder close at hand, so as to raise the
hose, (which he had in his grasp), that much nearer to
the flames, only avoided being completely cut off by letting
himself down in a hurry, rung by rung, hand over
hand.

He soon perceived that all the chances pointed to the

sweeping destruction of the Annex. Could the Rotunda,
—which was joined on to that structure by a roof resting
upon strong supports,—be saved by blowing up this
connecting bridge? If so, it had to be done quickly, for
already the flames had spread as far along the surface
of the ceiling of the public hall as the south door. There
had been prevailing very dry weather during the preceding
three months, and the timbers of the building were
in a highly inflammable condition. While Professor Echols
was arranging for the destruction of the intervening
roof, his unresting assistants, the students, were removing
the volumes of the law library, which was stored on a
lower floor; and they also rescued most of the engineering
instruments, and a small number of those belonging to
the department of physics.

This feverish task had not been finished when the bombardment
of the threatened portico began. Professor
Echols, having got possession of one hundred pounds of
dynamite, with the necessary fuses and caps, and aided
by Finch, a medical student, and Brune and Bishop, University
employees, was successful in bringing down pellmell
a portion of the intervening pillars; but the firm
roof itself, still upheld at one end by the Annex, and at
the other, by the Rotunda, remained in its place undamaged.
Unless it could be shaken to pieces, the preservation
of the Rotunda was impracticable. The flames of
the burning Annex were already licking the bridge; the
wind was blowing violently southward; and in a brief
time, the fire would leap across the barrier. There was
now but one possible means of disrupting the roof,—it
must be assaulted with dynamite from the top of the Rotunda.
Dr. Gordon Wilson was hurried off to town to
procure an additional supply of explosives. He jumped
into the first buggy that he met on the road, and having

covered the intervening ground at racing speed, knocked
up a merchant at his home,—it being Sunday,—carried
him off to his store, and returned with two boxes of
dynamite. During his absence, Professor Echols and his
assistants had smashed in the door to the passageway
which led up through the walls of the Rotunda to the
dome. By this act of forethought, a secon exit was
secured, should the advancing flames bar their descent
through the library. Professor Echols pried open one of
the boxes with an ax, poured the entire contents into a
meal-bag, shouldered it, and followed by other persons,
mounted up by the secret passageway to the top of the
building.

While these rapid preparations for the abrupt destruction
of the connecting roof were underway, the lofty circular
apartment of the library had become a scene of extraordinary
tumult and confusion. In anticipation of the
successful leap of the fire, the students, assisted by hundreds
of other willing and indefatigable hands, were now
absorbed in removing the books from the shelves. No
time was lost in waiting for the keys of the cases to be
brought,—the glass was ruthlessly broken open with the
aid of the first instrument at hand, and the volumes
dragged out in tumbling and indiscriminate masses. The
arms of the young men were heaped up with the precious
books; and so were the skirts of the ladies of the University,
who, at that critical moment, rushed forward,
with the spirit of heroines, to aid in saving the beloved
library from the flames. Load after load was thus
rushed to the windows overlooking the south portico, and
there dumped in a torrent into the blankets and sheets
held up below to catch the volumes as they fell,—afterwards
to be borne away to a spot on the Lawn that lay
beyond the reach of further danger. All the portraits

were removed without injury. It is said that one sturdy
student, with a strength that appeared superhuman, carried
off the large bust of Professor Minor, without assistance,
and then hurried back for the pedestal.

Smoke had soon begun to creep into the apartment
from above, and this increased the appalling strangeness
of the scene. Such an unmistakable proof of approaching
flames only augmented the excitement. The shuffling
sound of darting feet and the uproar of shouts and commands
and cries of encouragement were again and again
broken by the loud reverberations of the exploding dynamite
without. The college-bell was ringing continuously
in order to bring the people of the town to the rescue.
Four of the ladies had, of their own motion, seized the
bell-rope; and they did not cease to pull so long as it remained
intact. The flames, leaping across the connecting
roof, first struck the Rotunda just over the little
room that was entered from the upper gallery. This
apartment was stored with files of newspapers, yellow
from age; with stacks of pamphlets, old catalogues, and
engravings, that had been laid aside to be assorted; and
with a part of the Bohn donation of books. It was a
heap of tinder, and the fire on reaching it, spread at once
into a mighty furnace of flames.

The conflagration, however, had not yet reached so
far when Professor Echols, accompanied by Bishop, came
out upon the dome. Indifferent to the imminent peril of
his position, he, from a commanding point, coolly hurled
a mass of dynamite, fifty pounds in weight, upon the connecting
roof; and so terrific was the explosion which followed
that it was said to have been heard fifteen miles
away. The Rotunda rocked under the concussion, the
plaster fell from the ceiling of the dome, and every pane
of glass, not already broken, was shattered. The crowd

of people within the library made a rush for the single
door, for all were for the moment convinced that the
building was about to topple in ruins to the ground. The
connecting roof, however, remained intact, and the roaring
flames continued to advance. The thrower of the
dynamite, with his companion, only succeeded in escaping
by beating a retreat to the door of the steps descending
from the dome.

A few minutes before the explosion occurred, the fine
marble figure of Jefferson by Galt had been lowered by
ropes to the level of a table hastily pushed forward to
catch it. So great was its weight that this support at
once gave way under it; but luckily the fall to the floor
did not damage the statue. Turned over on its face,
it was rapidly dragged to the door opening on the front
stairway, and just as there began the attempt to pull it
through this narrow exit, the explosion shook the whole
building. "The statue," says Morgan P. Robinson, in
his vivid description of the scene,[2] "was gotten out on the
staircase, and step by step, it was carried down the western
stairs feet foremost. As the base of the statue was
eased over each step, it would gather momentum, and
gaining speed, would tear off the top edge of the next step,
while, under the combined weight of the statue and twenty
to thirty of the students, the whole staircase would tremble.
It is conservatively estimated that it took from ten
to fifteen minutes only to remove the statue from the
library to the Lawn."

When the statue had been pushed through the door of
the library, Colonel Venable, taking his stand on the
landing, quietly refused to permit the students to brush

by him or to dive under his arms, in order to bring off
additional loads of books,—which now could only be
effected at the risk of their lives. So soon as he concluded
that the last attempt had been made to enter, he
placed a stick across the two wings of the door, and then
descended the west stair. But as he went down on that
side, a party of students ascended the east stair; and
hardly had they reached the platform at the head of the
steps in front of the door, when its two wings flew open
sucked in by the draught. "It was," says Mr. Robinson,
"a magnificent sight to look on that gigantic roaring
furnace as the fresh air rushed in and cleared away
the smoke; here the pedestal of the marble statue, there
the pillars in the gallery; here the old iron railing from
the statue; there some dusty books left to their fate on
the shelves in the library; here a broken bookcase on the
floor; and there a perfect volcano of flame pouring into
the Rotunda from the Annex, and in a minute a cloud
of smoke shutting off everything from view."

The Rotunda was, by this time, abandoned to its unavoidable
fate. The prospect of the first pavilion on
either side of the Lawn catching fire from sparks and
flying brands had now become imminent. As a preventive,
blankets, previously thoroughly wetted, were spread
over the surface of their north walls and over their
fronts; and these were kept continuously saturated by a
bucket brigade which passed the water from the ground
to the roofs. This water had been obtained from the
spigots and hydrants of the nearest pavilions, and was
brought by all sorts of people, in all kinds of vessels,
from a pitcher to a basin. There was hardly a person
belonging to the University or to Charlottesville who
failed to take an active part in one way or another, in the
endeavor to arrest the flames, or to assist those who were

frantically employed in beating them back. Many of
the wives of the professors,—and it was even said that
some of the grave professors themselves,—performed
their share by cooking meals to appease the hunger of the
fire-fighters. The pavilions and dormitories were, perhaps,
only saved from destruction by a turn in the wind.
At first, it had blown fiercely from the north; but as the
already enormous heat of the burning or burnt buildings
increased, the current, suddenly shifting, began to blow
equally violently from the south; and this, in some measure,
walled back the flames. Brands were carried by
the changed wind as far as the home of Dr. Lambeth,
beyond the new gymnasium; and they even set Dr. Chancellor's
stable, on the opposite side, on fire.

Professor Echols and Bishop, thwarted in their courageous
endeavor to destroy the connecting roof, started
at once to break down the two wings which joined the
Rotunda, on its south front, with East and West Lawn.
While in the act of blowing up these low-lying buildings
with dynamite, Professor Echols slipped through the
roof of the reading-room,—into which one of the wings
had been converted,—and seriously injured his left hand.
At one o'clock, the interior framework of the Rotunda
fell in, and as the burning mass crashed downward, it was
noticed that there were few dry eyes among those that
looked on at this closing event in the drama of the conflagration.
The mighty furnace of embers lying on the
floor of the basement, within the circular line of the still
standing walls, died down, after a few hours, to a blackened
heap, composed of the still smouldering ashes of
the interior timbers, bookcases, and books. From the
moment that roof and floor caved in, there was no immediate
danger of a further spread of the flames; but

it was not until half past two o'clock in the afternoon
that the last reason for apprehension was removed.

The time-piece of the University had stopped running
sharply at five minutes to twelve. During the following
night, the entire Lawn remained littered with nearly
twelve thousand volumes, and also with the different instruments
from the laboratories which had been saved,
and with a large quantity too of miscellaneous articles.
The statue of Jefferson lay at full length on the grass,
its delicate marble protected from the weather by a
canvas covering. "When the moon came out," says
Mr. Robinson, "as though to take a last look at the pride
of Jefferson's latter days, it was a ghastly and heart-rending
sight to see the blackened walls and hollow windows,
and the tall white pillars, with their marble capitals, all
smoked up, standing as silent sentinels on the old portico,
where had stood so many of the men of note of this
country beneath the shadow of the dome of the Rotunda."
The Rotunda was merely a begrimed shell.
One wall of the Annex had fallen; the other tottered upon
its base. The two wings at the south front of the Rotunda
had been left a mass of ruins by the dynamite used
to destroy them.

So soon as the fire began to make such progress that
the ability to arrest it was perceived to be doubtful,
Aubrey Bowers, a law student, suggested to Colonel
Venable that a telegram should be at once despatched
to the cities of Richmond, Lynchburg, and Staunton for
immediate assistance. Staunton promptly sent fifteen
men and a large quantity of hose to the University.
That city possessed no fire-engine. The authorities of
Lynchburg forwarded a special train loaded with a fire-engine,
firemen, and hose. The cars transporting an engine,

hose, and firemen from Richmond travelled at the
rate of sixty-five miles an hour. When the engineer was
signaled at Gordonsville to stop in order to be informed
that the flames were under control, so great was the
speed with which his train was moving that he only succeeded
in halting it after running several hundred yards
beyond the station.

It was not simply to the hearts of those who resided in
the shadow of the Rotunda that the destruction of that
imposing edifice carried a pang of unaffected sorrow and
sharp regret. The alumni of New York fully expressed
the sad emotions of every branch of the General Association,
however remote from the scene, when they said:
"In all our memories of student life and joyous youth,
those stately buildings (Rotunda and the Annex) stood
in the center of our associations of love and pride. Even
in their architectural forms, in the shaping and posing of
the columns, and in the curve of the dome,—lines and
elevation that stood in such exquisite relation with the
natural loveliness of the Piedmont landscape,—there
was something that seemed always to speak to us of the
amplitude and symmetry, of the grace and strength and
nobleness, of the mind of the great Virginian from which
our University system, the largest and most abiding work
of the American people in dealing with education, had
sprung into existence. And it was in the passing under
the dome, and through the colonnade into the great hall
itself, that the sweetest scenes of our young lives lived in
our memories,—the pressure on our arms of hands that
were very dear, the burst of youthful oratory from the
champions of the Washington and the Jefferson that we
loved, the solemn words of our old professors urging us
to the manly life, and the bestowal of those hard-earned
degrees that were to be our passport to the duties and the

honors of the world. To each of us the loss of those
buildings meant a personal sorrow that is perhaps never
to be consoled."