Smelter Boarding House Reduced to Ash After Brawl
A drunken dispute between boarders turned into an explosive inferno at the smelter district, leaving residents fleeing for their lives.
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.
A fire, caused by the explosion of a lamp, entirely consumed the boarding house of Mrs. Casper Zeigelmeier at the smelter last night. Besides the loss of the building and contents, several men were injured, some seriously. Between half-past seven and 8 o'clock, while several of the boarders were in a front room playing cards, Anton Kahler came in and tried to pick a quarrel with one of the men, John Zypan. Kahler was full of smelter whisky and in a fighting mood. He accused Zypan of calling him a 'scab,' and when the latter refused to enter into a quarrel, Kahler picked up a chair and threw it at him. The chair struck Zypan in the face and knocked down a large hanging lamp. The lamp was knocked into a corner, and as soon as the oil began to run out, an explosion followed, which threw the burning oil in all directions. The men present made an attempt to smother the flames, but their efforts were fruitless. In less than an hour, the building was a mass of charred ruins. With possibly a dozen exceptions, the 35 men rooming at the lodging house lost everything.
“Kahler was full of smelter whisky and in a fighting mood.”
Boarding houses were the critical, often dangerous, infrastructure for Tacoma’s industrial workforce. This fire highlights the precarious living conditions of laborers who, like the men in the smelter district, lived in volatile, overcrowded housing on the margins of the city's industry.
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