Book review of The Richmond Theater Fire, by Meredith Henne Baker (Part 1)

Hello everyone - sorry for the silence on the blog for the last few months.  But I was very busy painting my house and crafting paper flowers and getting my little girl married off!

Since the wedding ceremony was held at the Virginia Historical Society, Debra and Peggy took the opportunity to each buy a book from the gift shop there: 

The Richmond Theater Fire

By Meredith Henne Baker

This is the fire that we covered in a previous blog post, but this book is definitely worthy of a few more blog posts here on our family ancestry blog.  Debra has summarized the book for us, and over the next few blog posts, we will provide some of that information for you.

To refresh your memory, the governor of Virginia, George W. Smith, who died in this tragic fire was the son of our great-great-great-great-great uncle Meriwether Smith.

“The Richmond Theater . . . was among the largest in America, and its destruction by fire forms one of the striking events of early American history.”       Washington Post, January 3, 1994

 

Excerpt from the book:

“Monumental Church sits . . . like a domed white sepulcher” on the 12^th block of East Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia.

A state-issued historical marker there gives “a few clues to the astounding story of a tragedy that forever transformed the capital of the South.”  The monument’s marker reads as follows:

 

Virginia Governor George W. Smith died here in 1811. Several survivors owed their lives to the bravery of Gilbert Hunt, a slave blacksmith. A committee chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall raised funds for the church’s construction. Designed by Robert Mills and completed in 1814, the octagonal building served as an Episcopal church until 1965.

 

Once this location was the site of the Richmond Theater. On the night of December 26, 1811, the theater became a tomb.

 

In the subterranean vault of the Monumental Church is a crypt, rising as an enormous mound and forming a basement tomb.

The Historic Richmond Foundation used ground-penetrating radar to detect the location within this funeral mound of two oversized wooden coffins.

The contents of these coffins? Nearly a hundred charred bodies “in a cluttered heap, relics of those who attended the Richmond Theater one festive holiday night over two hundred years ago.”

The horribly burned remains of “slave, free, schoolgirl, gentry, governor, Jew, Catholic, father, actress” all mingled in this sad place.

Because it was impossible to separate and identify the ashes and the partial bodies of these fire victims, the decision was made to inter all of them together, on the site of the theater itself.

Here they died together and here they would rest eternally.