1875 Holyoke church fire gave push to modern safety codes

HOLYOKE — Building codes in Victorian America were antiquated, but the nationally circulated story of a fire in Holyoke is a large part of the reason why the doors of public buildings, even today, open outward, allowing people to flow out of a building and not get caught behind doors in case of an emergency.

Call this a basic, primitive technology, but outward-facing doors were an early update to building laws implemented in Holyoke, and they caught on nationally in 1875 after the deadliest incident in Holyoke history.

This “outward door cause” was fought for by John Lynch, who was the hero on the day of May 27, 1875, when 70 were killed in a fire at Precious Blood Church.

It is not known or provable whether the doors of the church had, in fact, opened inward or outward, said Robert Comeau. Comeau, a local historian who leads the Holyoke Canal Tours, gave a presentation at the end of May in the Holyoke Public Library to 25 people who gathered on the 150th anniversary of the fire.

There he explained that, regardless of the way the doors swung open, “it doesn’t matter, because there had been no law yet in Massachusetts, and it got into action a few months after and made a law that said you have to have doors that open outward on public institutions.”

And that set a precedent for other states to follow suit.

Not only was Holyoke a mecca of industrial opportunity and an acclaimed U.S. city at the time, which automatically drew attention to the deaths, but up to this point in American history, the Precious Blood church fire was one of the most devastating fires and losses of life in the country’s history, and so the story whizzed around the nation.

With that came the impetus for preventing serious casualties in the event of a fire.

“It had a good impact for the wrong reason,” said Comeau.

In the days following the fire, it was reported around the country that 78 died in what some publications called a “holocaust.”

Comeau said this was just a dose of the tabloid-esque sensationalism around the event at the time, and that in fact 70 had perished in the fire, according to his research into Holyoke’s death records.

Among the stories that circulated out of Holyoke were those of charred, unrecognizable corpses, one even of an old woman sitting in a chair, whose clothes were burned right off her body.

Caskets were paid for by the city, and the funeral processions inched by the mills and schools where the victims worked and learned. Meanwhile, those mills and schools took the day off as part of mourning.

It was a Thursday night that had started out with 400 or so in the church, which had a capacity of 600, Comeau said.

Those gathered were there to attend vespers, or evening prayer, for the feast of Corpus Christi, which is a commemoration of the Roman Catholic belief in the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine used at Mass.

The church that burned was a temporary pine structure built alongside the brick and mortar church that was still under construction.

The Precious Blood campus, which also eventually accommodated several schools and residences, was located on the block formed by Cabot, South East, Clemente and Hamilton streets.

Comeau said it was a curtain over a statue of Mary that led to a domino effect of flames throughout the church, since all the walls were decorated with draperies to cover the plain pine walls.

“You had a very bad situation here,” he said.

Firefighters raced to the church in less than two minutes. A baseball game was interrupted by the fire, and the firefighters had a smoke on their way to the church, said Comeau.

Those who died, he said, were French Canadian migrant farmworkers, and all of them poor. Helene Blais, one of the victims, was in the first pew of the church that night and saw the flame spread from the candle to the church’s drapes. She was buried in St. Jerome Cemetery in Holyoke.

Some burials were held in Greenfield, others in Quebec, but most of the victims were placed in a mass grave in Precious Blood Cemetery in South Hadley, where the remains of 55 are buried.

The mass grave is shared with the founder of Precious Blood Church, the Rev. Andre Dufresne, who led the night’s services and who died years after.

Comeau said that during the tragedy, Dufresne, who had a reputation for being authoritative, calmly tried to help people exit the church. While he survived, his own brother did not.

His grave, memorialized with a tall marble structure now in the center of Precious Blood Cemetery, was moved to South Hadley after the second Precious Blood Church was demolished in 1989.

His grave was to the front left of the new church, and the city was expanding its sidewalks. If he had not been moved, his casket would have been under that sidewalk.

Samuel Gelinas can be reached at [email protected].