This is a five-installment post about the connections between the Ridge and the Iroquois Theater fire. To read all the posts go to the Ridge Historical Society Facebook page.
Part 3. Poignant reminders of the Iroquois Theater fire tragedy that occurred on December 30, 1903, are the family gravesites of the victims found in many Chicago cemeteries.
Mt. Greenwood Cemetery at 2900 West 111th Street has documented the graves of victims buried there. It is likely other victims are buried in other Ridge cemeteries.
One of the touching sites at Mt. Greenwood Cemetery is the Berg/Guthardt family plot. Frank A. Berg, an immigrant from Sweden in the real estate business, lost his entire family to the fire – his wife, Hilma, also from Sweden, and both of their children, Olga, 13, and Victor, 11.
Buried in the same plot are Adelheid Guthardt and her daughter, Elise (“Libby”), 15. These were neighbors of the Bergs, and assumedly, the mothers and children went to the play together, perished together, and the gravesite was started by the two families together. The Guthardts were from Germany and husband/father John was a machinist. Two sons remained.
Also buried together at Mt. Greenwood Cemetery are cousins who perished together in the fire, Henrietta (“Etta”) Polzin, 17, and Marie Koehler, 15. The Koehlers lived at 9900 S. Vincennes Ave. and kept a saloon, and the Polzins lived in Lyons, Illinois. The girls’ mothers, Elizabeth Polzin and Bertha Polzin Koehler, sister of Etta’s father, were with their daughters at the theater, but many family members became separated in the crowds trying to escape. Both mothers were burned but survived, according to the website iroquoistheater.com.
Two other victims of the fire buried in Mt. Greenwood Cemetery were young men and their stories are also found on the website iroquoistheater.com.
Arthur Caville, 24, was a tenor from New York, originally from England. He was at the Iroquois Theater that day to apply for a job. The production he had been in at the Illinois Theater had just closed two days before due to the star’s untimely death from pneumonia, putting the cast out of work. He was waiting for the manager in the auditorium when the fire broke out. He reportedly died trying to save a child. His young widow could not afford to transport his body back to New York for burial.
John Steve Hartman was 22 and attended the performance with his step-mother and, likely, some younger siblings, all of whom survived the inferno. He was an apprentice engineer, and the family lived on the 5700 block of South Halsted, where they ran a harness business. He was buried in Mt. Greenwood Cemetery next to his father, Andrew Hartman, who had died in 1893.
Next installment: The aftermath of the fire.