Newhall House Fire Anniversary
Today, January 10, 2025, marks the 142nd anniversary of the Newhall House Hotel Fire. My novel, Of the Embers, was inspired by this fire.
The Newhall House was a premier hotel in Milwaukee that burned to the ground on this day in 1883, killing between 76 and 100 people, making it the deadliest fire in the city of Milwaukee to date. There is no exact death toll count for a couple of reasons. One reason is that the hotel register from that night was lost in the fire so there was no accurate count of the number of guests staying at the hotel that night. All other hotel registers going back to the date the Newhall House opened in 1857 survived the fire. The second, more disturbing, reason for an inexact count is that some of the bodies of those who perished were nothing more that ash outlines, making an exact count of fatalities impossible.
When the Newhall House Hotel first opened as a luxury hotel it was one of the tallest buildings in the United States at six stories tall. It dominated the early Milwaukee skyline and was host to the rich and famous. On the night of the fire, guests included General Tom Thumb and his wife, at least three inventors, a former Wisconsin governor, a district judge, and a group of traveling entertainers. The Newhall House also was one of the earliest buildings in Wisconsin to install electric lights. At the time of the fire, the hotel was lit by a combination of a few electric light fixtures in the public areas and gas lamps throughout the rest of the hotel.
Eyewitness accounts of the fire tell stories of brave escapes and braver rescues. Two young men scaled down the exterior walls of the hotel from the fourth floor to escape the fire and both survived. One fireman repeatedly entered the blazing building to guide out groups of survivors and another fireman rescued 10 women from the fifth floor by crawling back and forth over a ladder he placed between the Newhall House and the roof of a building across the 20-foot alley between them. At one point, one of the women this fireman was helping across the ladder bridge slipped from the ladder and was saved only by him grabbing her by one ankle. Eyewitness accounts tell of her swinging precariously beneath the ladder before being hauled back up and carried to safety by the burly fireman.
Other guests were not so lucky. Besides those who perished in the fire, eleven people jumped from the upper story windows to escape the flames, only to die from the fall. Some of those who jumped from the windows fell onto and were severely injured or killed by the telegraph wires surrounding the Newhall House. Those same wires thwarted attempts by rescuers to get ladders close enough to the building to be of use to rescue those trapped in the flames.
As a result of the Newhall House fire, Milwaukee formed a building inspection department and a set of codes to avoid another fire like the 1883 disaster. Several other cities later followed suit.
A new hotel was built on the site of the Newhall House Hotel and opened three years later. That building still stands today at the corner of East Wisconsin Avenue and North Broadway, The Hilton Garden Inn Downtown. Not only is it on the same site, but the sub-basement of the Hilton Garden Inn is the basement of the old Newhall House. I had the privilege of being taken on a tour of the sub-basement by hotel staff. The old footings of the Newhall are in place, a couple of old storerooms are still present, the base of the servant staircase is still there, and there are even charred portions of wall in one corner remaining from the Newhall House fire. Some staff have ghost stories to tell from their ventures into this sub-basement and I was told that a visiting ghost hunter could feel the panic and hear the screams of multiple spirits just outside the door leading into this area.