Sixteen Children March Out of a Burning Home in Their Nightclothes
A Kennewick boy barely escapes a Spokane orphanage fire — and the children's drill-book exit becomes the only thing that saves them.
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.
Harry Conway, the ten-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Chas. Conway, returned Monday evening from Spokane, where he was visiting some little friends in the home of the Washington Children's Home Finding association.
The home burned Monday morning about four o'clock. Harry and the rest of the sixteen little ones were awakened by the cries of a small child who was alarmed by the smoke in her room. The sixteen children belonging to the home jumped out of bed and formed in line and marched out of the building at double quick time, but in regular order.
The children were able only to save themselves in their night clothes, everything else being burned. They were soon clad by the kind people of Spokane and provided with temporary homes until the association can get settled again. The matron was slightly burned trying to save some things belonging to the home.
“The sixteen children belonging to the home jumped out of bed and formed in line and marched out of the building at double quick time, but in regular order.”
A children's institution burning at four in the morning in 1917 is a reminder that fire codes, alarms and sprinkler mandates were written in blood and smoke — and that the people who ran these homes were often the only line between sixteen sleeping children and a total loss. Child-welfare agencies then relied on the charity of neighbors to clothe and shelter the displaced overnight; today the same scramble happens through county emergency placements. The detail that lingers is the drill: someone had taught those children to form a line, and it worked.
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