Tragedy on Sixth Avenue
A young child dies after a tragic accident at home while her father was working at his pharmacy downstairs.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Beryl, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. George K. Sargent of Sixth Avenue and Prospect Street, was burned to death this morning. The child's clothing caught fire from a hot stove. No one was in the room when the accident happened. Mrs. Sargent had just stepped into another room when she heard the child scream. Hurrying back, she found the girl's clothing on fire and flames leaping over her face. She smothered the flames as best she could and called for assistance from the drug store down the street, but not until the child had been terribly burned. The little one lingered in terrible agony until 11:30 a.m., when death came to her relief. Mr. Sargent is the proprietor of the Red Cross Pharmacy at Sixth Avenue and Prospect Street, where the family lives upstairs. Both parents are completely prostrated by the sudden and terrible death of their little child.
“Hurrying back into the room she found the girl's clothing on fire and the flames leaping up over her face.”
The intersection of Sixth Avenue and Prospect Street remains a central node in the North End, though the Red Cross Pharmacy is long gone. Accidents involving open-flame heating were a grim, common reality of residential life in 1904, serving as a reminder of the hazards in early 20th-century housing.
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