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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2003 • THE STATE NEWSROOM
• PAGE 11
C O L U M B I A S O U T H C A R O L I N
A
By KRISTY EPPLEY RUPON, Staff Writer
Kershaw County residents gather the
morning after the 1923 Cleveland School fire to begin the cleanup
process and to identify the bodies of the dead. Many of those who
died were buried in a mass grave at nearby Beulah United Methodist
Church.
‘The school was going to burn down on me’
77 people died when fired destroyed Camden’s Cleveland School
Cleveland School students are pictured in front of the school in
1921 or 1922, just a year or two before the fire.
The fire devastated the Charlotte
Thompson community, killing 77 people, including several entire
families.
EIGHTY YEARS ago, when C.C. Bruce took
the stage for the senior play at Kershaw County’s Cleveland School,
he didn’t know that four of eight fellow actors, and nearly a third
of the audience, would die that evening.
On May 17, 1923, an oil lamp fell to the
floor at the school, starting a fire. Audience members tried to put
it out, but the flames reached flimsy curtains, and the building
went up quickly.
Seventy-seven people perished in the
blaze, one of the worst school fires the nation had seen. The
tragedy had a significant impact on adopting strict building and
fire code standards in the United States, according to Gene
Faulkenberry, today’s Kershaw County fire marshal.
The small Charlotte Thompson community,
several miles outside of Camden, was devastated by the fire. Most
families lost at least one member and, in some instances, whole
families perished.
Those who survived later told their
stories.
Bruce, 19, was playing the role of Ned in
the play “Topsy Turvey,” which was being performed by seniors as
part of commencement exercises. It was the last event scheduled in
the building; students would be sent to other schools the following
year.
“Everyone acted panicky and began to rush
for the stairway, the only exit, and a very narrow and rickety one,”
Bruce said in a 1923 interview with The Columbia Record, a former
afternoon newspaper published by The State-Record Co.
“The men tried to keep the crowd from
pushing each other down the steps but could not control them, and
the flames were licking closer on all sides,” Bruce said. “Soon,
some of the people in the hall began going to the windows and began
jumping out. Mothers threw their children to ones below and some
jumped after them.”
Clara Hinson Woodson was one of those who
jumped out the window. At 14, she was in charge of several younger
siblings and a cousin at the event. She shared her story with the
Kershaw County Historical Society seven years ago, at age 88.
When the fire started, Woodson headed for
the stairwell with a friend, but she went back to look for the other
children. The only one she could find was her sister, Leila, who had
suffered from pneumonia the previous winter and was having trouble
breathing.
Woodson saved her and her sister’s lives
when she stopped at a window to let her sister get a breath of fresh
air. While she was stopped, several people jumped out of the windows
and were caught by people below.
“The man on the ground kept saying to me,
as I held Leila up for air, ‘Drop the little girl down,’” Woodson
wrote. “Leila was crying and holding to the window ledge but I
pried her fingers loose, and as she dropped, the man caught her. ...
I got into the window, gripped the ledge and then released it. I
came to myself with Leila pulling at my dress and telling me that I
must get up, that the school was going to burn down on me.”
Another of Woodson’s sisters was badly
burned and took months to recover, but her 11-year- old sister and
9-year-old brother, along with a 9-year-old cousin, died.
Many who died in the Cleveland School
fire were jammed into the stairwell, which collapsed and trapped the
victims. Some were crushed to death before the flames even reached
them.
Woodson wrote in
her recount to the Kershaw County Historical Society that she went
back to the fire scene the next day to identify her brother and
sister. She could only identify her brother from the remainder of
his shirt; her sister had hardly been burned.
“There was no sign of burning on her
except this one little spot of hair that showed some singe. This was
my beautiful sister, Ora Belle. There were no burns on her dress,
none on her body and her socks and sandals looked just as they did
when she had dressed the evening before. I later realized that she
was probably one of the first to go down the steps and fell as
others fell onto her.”
Ina Stephens was the school’s principal.
She told her story to The State newspaper a couple of days after the
fire, from the front porch of her home that stood just 500 yards
from the school ruins.
“I don’t know exactly how I escaped the
flames,” Stephens said. “I was caught in the jam near the cloak room
door, and someone picked me up by my feet and threw me on top of the
crowd. Someone else pulled me out and threw me out of the door.”
Stephens said the community had been
planning to celebrate the closing of the school the day after the
play with a picnic on the school grounds. Instead, they gathered at
the scene to identify and mourn their dead.
“We had fried chicken, baked cakes and
cooked the usual good things to eat for the next day (for the
picnic),” she said in the interview 80 years ago. “And to think the
day was turned into the most horrible in the history of South
Carolina instead of our nice, quiet little picnic.”
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