On a Wednesday afternoon in Chicago, December 30, 1903, eighteen hundred people
went to the city's newest luxury playhouse, the Iroquois Theater
on Randolph St. It was the day before New Year's Eve, at
the end of the holidays, and the audience was filled with
children, families and teachers. The Mr. Bluebeard
production was a magical presentation featuring hundreds of
performers, exotic costumes, aerial ballet and glittering
lights.
When a
fire broke out on stage and could not be contained, it spread to
the auditorium and within minutes claimed
nearly six hundred
victims, including
forty one Chicago teachers. The Meagher sisters were
in the audience that day. Ellen Meagher came home but Maria did
not.
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Thirty-four-year-old Schiller elementary school
teacher, Maria / Marie T. Meagher (b. 1869), and her
younger sister, thirty-year-old Ellen F. Meagher
(1873–1955), were the daughters of Irish immigrants,
John Meagher (1825–1911) and the late Ellen Hurley
Meagher (1834–1890). John had emigrated to America
in 1852. Until retirement in 1887, he was an
accountant for a Chicago medical supply wholesaler,
Bliss & Torrey.
Five of John
and Ellen's children, including Maria and Ellen,
grew to maturity. Two sons moved to Helena, Montana,
where John F. Meagher Jr. became a steamfitter, and
Daniel J. Meagher (b. 1866) became a watchmaker and
jeweler. The pair also dabbled in mining sapphires
on the Missouri River. Daniel and John Jr.
traveled from Montana to Chicago for Maria's
funeral. A third son, also a steamfitter, Joseph F.
Meagher (b. 1876), was killed in some sort of
accident "at Harvard."
Maria and Ellen lived with their father at 656
Orchard Street in Chicago. The family had lost their
home in the 1871 Chicago fire and built another.
Maria was one of the twelve graduates from the 1879
class at North Division High School (today's Lincoln
Park High School). Ellen worked as a mobile
hairdresser.
The school where Maria taught on Vedder Street had
been rebuilt after being destroyed by the Great
Chicago fire in 1871, a $32,000 loss to the city,
and one of ten city-owned schools destroyed by that
fire.
The school then was named North Branch Primary.
It is notable that schools
were closed for only two weeks after the Great Fire.
Several Chicago school records report that Maria was
a teacher at Schiller school as early as 1885 when
she was only sixteen years old.
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When rebuilt, the Vedder street school was named
after German poet Johann Christoph Friedrich von
Schiller. Freedom was a common theme of Schiller's
work, and many schools bore his name in the late
1800s and early 1900s. Chicago's Schiller school was
located at 700 W. Vedder until the street was
renamed W. Scott street. Among the textbooks Maria
may have used with her students was Metcalf's
English Grammar and McMaster's Primary History of
the United States.
In 1962 the Schiller school was rebuilt,
incorporating the turquoise architectural panels
that helped make it a familiar structure in the
Cabrini-Green area. There were 26 teachers and 1,050
students at Schiller School in 1915; I didn't find a
count for 1903.
In the years after the fire
In 1910 Ellen lived alone on Orchard St. By 1930, she'd changed
occupations, working as a social worker, and was
involved in women's clubs. In 1935 she visited her
brother in Montana and in 1950 spent two weeks in
Bermuda.
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