The Bucket Brigade That Saved a Block
Two brothers woke to smoke and falling embers in a Third Street lodging house, then doused the roof fire before the department could even join the fight.
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.
An alarm of fire was turned in at 7:30 this morning from box 43, corner Third and Main streets, caused by the frantic cries of fire yelled by many mouths occupying quarters in the Los Angeles lodging house, 208 Third Street, near the corner of Columbia, of which Renaldo Moses is the host. It seems that John Jackson and his brother Carl, two Italian brothers, are quartered in the last rear room on the second floor of the Los Angeles, overlooking tide water. At nine o'clock Jackson the elder was awakened by the wind, laying its lash right and left, to find the room rather uncomfortably filled with smoke for breathing purposes, to see also, through the opaque atmosphere, small chunks of fire dropping from the aperture where the stovepipe pokes the ceiling. Jackson jumped like a jaguar from the jungle on a trembling giraffe, from the bed, woke his brother, and the two, after getting into boots and breeches, in the meantime giving the alarm, got onto the back porch, finding there fortunately a cask of water with several buckets alongside. With commendable presence of mind one of the men scrambled onto the roof of the house and the other passed up bucket after bucket filled with the fluid antagonistic to fire. Half a dozen of these poured down the mouth of the flaming funnel effectually squelched the embryonic blaze and the fire department that was by this time, with its usual alertness, on the ground, did not go into active service.
It's a very fortunate thing that John Jackson happened to awake just as he did. Fifteen minutes more and the fire fiend, aided by the whistling wind, would have gained probably an undisputed sway with the result of obliterating in that quarter of Olympia anything in the shape of habitable houses.
“With commendable presence of mind one of the men scrambled onto the roof of the house and the other passed up bucket after bucket filled with the fluid antagonistic to fire.”
Boarding houses like the Los Angeles were common in 1890s Olympia, packing many residents into wooden buildings with stovepipes and shared hazards. The story is a reminder that fire safety in dense housing—then and now—depends on early warning and the luck of a neighbor waking in time.
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