The Midnight Hotel Fire
A suspected incendiary targets a local hotel, only to be thwarted by staff before the flames reach the dining room.
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.
Walla Walla's police department is searching for a firebug who made a deliberate attempt to burn the Hotel State at 12 o'clock last night by setting fire to a pile of papers in a wooden dumb-waiter in the kitchen. But for the prompt work of night bartender Jack Bryant and Night Clerk Smith, the attempt would have been successful. A roaring noise attracted Bryant's attention, and he rushed into the kitchen to find the dumb-waiter blazing. He and Smith turned on a water faucet and extinguished the flames before the department arrived. The fact that dishes were stored in the top of the waiter, shutting off the draft, prevented the flames from spreading to the dining room and the rest of the hotel. A few minutes before, Bryant had noticed a stranger pass through the saloon toward the rear, though it is not known if he was involved. A half-hour later, a load of hay near the Bryan Bros. barn was also set on fire, requiring the fire department's attention.
“A roaring and crackling noise attracting Mr. Bryant's attention he rushed out into the old kitchen, which is a corrugated iron and wooden structure, to find the wooden dumb-waiter fiercely blazing up.”
Arson has historically been a terrifying threat to wood-frame downtowns like early 20th-century Walla Walla. While building codes have vastly improved, the vulnerability of dense urban centers to fire remains a cornerstone of municipal policy and public anxiety.
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