To
friends and family, twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth
G. 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
the theater on December 30, 1903. Nor is it
known where she was seated or how badly she was
injured. All that can be said with certainty
is that she was alive the morning of December 30,
1903 and after attending a matinee performance of
Mr. Bluebeard at Chicago's new playhouse, the
Iroquois Theater, Charles Kulas was a widower.
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.
Was Georgia the former Lizzie Drehouse?
There is a fair
chance that Georgiana was the former Elizabeth Anne "Lizzie" Drehouse (sometimes spelled Daehouse,
Dreahouse, Dreyhouse or Drayhouse).
Lizzie Drehouse and Georgia _____ Kulas were
each born around 1876 in Iowa. Each
had a father born in Louisiana and a mother
born in Pennsylvania. Significantly,
Lizzie's brother named his first-born
daughter Georgianna Drehouse. Since
Georgianna was not a common name, I suspect
she was named after his late sister.
Lizzie was oldest of
four children born to John Drehouse
(1845-1977) and the late Theresa Rosina
Glass Drehouse of Dubuque, Iowa. Son of a
civil war veteran, John was a New Orleans
native; Rosina, who died in 1892, had been
born in Pennsylvania. For a living John manufactured
derricks, sold safes and lightening rods,
and moved houses, later turning to chimney
cleaning. One of Georgiana's younger
brothers, Frank F. Drehouse, was the one who
seemingly named his daughter after Lizzie.
(Georgianna the namesake may have been the
sort of fun-loving woman that is often
beloved by nieces and nephews – while their
parents pray she won't be a role model.
She married at a very young age and soon
found herself involved in trouble that today
would bring consternation and scandal but in
1927 brought three days in jail. The
5-foot 96-pound eighteen year old served
three days in the Anamosa, Iowa jail for
adultery. She
remarried, a few times, once maybe to the
same fellow, her first husband, the one who
had thrown her in jail. Her final
marriage seems to have been the best fit.
She lived to age eight-eight.)
Georgia's
sister, Tilly Drehouse, lived in Chicago in
1900, working as a servant but I don't know
if she was still living there in 1903.
Discrepancies
* 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.
Theater scrubwoman dies,
brave daughter escapes
Teenagers Bour and Graham
survived Iroquois Theater fire
John R. Freeman Theater
fire investigator
James
Cummings Iroquois Theater stage carpenter
Chicago police chief
Francis O'Neill
Columbia theater managed
by Davis also burned
Nellie married her boss
Chicago 1903 Building
Department
First visit to Chicago
Emily Henning and her
four sons
William Boice family
Iroquois Theater victims
Lizzie Danner was left
with a blue vase and pink bedroom set
Hull family of 4 perished
Illinois Theater another
Syndicate operation
Harvard Illinois couple
Iroquois Theater victims
If you have additional
info about an Iroquois victim, or find an error, I would like to
hear from you. Chaos and communication limitations of 1903
produced many errors I'm striving to correct and welcome all the help I can get. Space is provided at the
bottom of stories for comments, or
contact
me directly. To receive email notification of new content,
let me know.
(Don't expect your inbox to fill up with emails as I rarely consider
a story to be finished. For Facebook users, following the
Iroquois Theater
Facebook page will mostly accomplish the same end since mostly
completed Iroquois stories are posted there. Mostly.)