To friends and family, twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth G. Drehouse? Kulas* (b. 1875) was known as Georgia. She and her husband, fellow Iowan Charles A. Kulas (1869-1912), had married around 1895 and moved to Chicago. In 1903 they occupied a rented flat at 349 Chestnut. They had not yet started a family.

It is not yet known, and maybe will never be known, who went with Georgia to an afternoon matinee of Mr. Bluebeard at Chicago's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois theater on December 30, 1903.  Nor is it known where she was seated or how badly she was injured.

Georgia's body was found at Jordan's funeral home and identified by a C. J. Renshaw.†  She was buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Key West, Iowa. Charles was laid by her side in 1912.  

In the years after the fire
 The son of a harness maker, Charles Kulas tried a variety of jobs before his early death, working as a machinist, typesetter and salesman.  He died nine years after his wife, at age thirty eight.  By that time Charles had left Chicago and was living in Manhattan, NYC, working as a machinist in a printing company.  I've failed to learn the cause of his death.

Discrepancies and addendum

* In one newspaper report Georgia was listed as Georgeanna Meyer and her age was reported as twenty-seven, though she'd turned twenty-eight two months earlier. In some reports she was listed twice, as Mrs. Charles Kulas and as Mrs. Georgiana Kulas. Her first name appeared as Georgiana, Georgeanna and Georgina. Her grave maker reports her name as Elizabeth and her nickname as Georgia. In the 1900 US Census the last name was spelled Kules and Georgia's birth year was reported as 1876 rather than 1875.

†Reported in one 1904 publication as a female, C. J. Renshaw is thought to have been Charlie J. Renshaw (1876-1912), the only C. J. Renshaw in a likely age range known to have been living in Chicago in 1903. The twenty-seven year old salesman for the Milwaukee Dustless Brush Company went on to marry May Frances Lally in 1909 but died three years later, together with May, in tragic circumstances.  The couple was found dead in their four-room week-old cottage they'd saved to purchase and furnish.  They were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas water heater improperly installed by Charlie without a vent, contrary to a three-year-old Chicago building ordinance.  Reportedly he sought to relieve his May from the burden of heating water on a coal stove.  Their bodies were discovered around a day after their deaths by the contractor who built the house.  He had come to make his final inspection of the Wilcox street structure.  Because a kitchen window was opened a few inches and the couple were fully clothed, indicating they had not yet gone to bed, police considered whether their coffee had been somehow poisoned during their move to the new home.  Their two partly filled cups were on the kitchen table.  With further investigation it was learned the contractor had opened the window because the water heater, though described as empty, was still operating and the temperature in the home was "150 degrees."  The coffee remains were tested and found to be free of poison, and the coroner ruled their deaths as accidental suffocation from the water heater.  Perhaps it was a model such as the Jewel 503.  Newspapers in 1912 got some bad information and tried to juice up the pathos in the story (like there wasn't enough?!)  by claiming the couple had been married for only ten weeks but in the 1910 census, enumeration beginning in April of that year, a Charles J. Renshaw, who sold brushes, and his wife, "Mar," reported they'd been married for a year.

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