A sign bearing a picturing of the burning barracks in the Great Fire of 1912, placed in front of Morrill Hall, commemorates the event that destroyed the campus 100 years ago today. University staff will live-tweet the events tonight.
Ten decades, 1,200 months, 5,200 weeks — 100 years have gone by since 1912. But as difficult as it is to imagine the world on Nov. 29, 1912, it’s even more difficult to imagine a campus almost entirely burnt to the ground.
The smell of smoke may be long gone, the ashes of the old campus buildings long swept away, but the memory of the Great Fire at the Maryland Agricultural College, this university’s former name, was never extinguished. And today marks the 100-year anniversary of the event that nearly put the school to rest.
The University Archives are commemorating the anniversary with several special events, according to university Archivist Anne Turkos. Chalk outlines and commemorative plaques have been placed where the burned buildings once stood on South Campus. Additionally, archive staff members will be live-tweeting the major events of the fire starting tonight, with the fire’s outbreak.
“It was such an important part of our history that we need to commemorate it in an important way,” she said.
The Reveille, the Maryland Agricultural College yearbook, printed a poem in 1897 from an unnamed student that read:
“But what in the midst of night,
Within this place of learning,
Some sleepy crier,
Should call out ‘fire!
The M.A.C. is burning!’”
It was only speculation, listing “what ifs” in meter and rhyme. But the M.A.C. would not have to wait long to find out — just 15 years later, it actually happened.
According to newspaper articles and firsthand accounts, the details of the fire are hazy — no one knows for sure where or how it started. But there were too many variables, too many mistakes for the fire to be a minor event.
The evening of Nov. 29, 1912, was a chilly one. There were about 50 people on the campus, and the cadets who had stayed for Thanksgiving, as well as their dates, were assembled in the barracks, ready for an evening of dinner and dancing.
However, the festivities were interrupted at about 10:15 p.m. by an announcement that the adjacent building was on fire.
Some said it was the result of an electrical shortage. Some said the fire started from some oily rags.
Lee “Duck” Pennington, a sophomore at the time, said in a firsthand account to the University Archives in 1973 that he heard the fire started when a couple of cadets accidentally threw a lit cigarette or match into a trash can in one of the dorm rooms.
As the fire spread to the barracks, the ceilings began to cave, and students and their dates rushed out into the cold late-autumn night.
The dorms, dining hall, offices and academic buildings were soon crumbling as the fire burned on, according to The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun.
“For those who find the soul thrilled by the awe-inspiring rush of roaring, leaping, gleaming flames crowned by billowing, eddying clouds of smoke, the spectacle was grand, indeed,” an article in then-student newspaper The Triangle, read.
As hard as students and administrators tried to stop it, there was too much working against them. A strong wind fed the flames, spreading them from building to building.
They tried to bring in fire trucks from Washington, but no arrangements had been made to get the trucks out of the train they had been sent in.
“They just had to sit there on the tracks while the barracks burned,” Pennington said in his account.
They tried to put the fire out using the campus water tower but made the unfortunate discovery that there was barely any water left because of an accident. Students celebrating after beating St. John’s of Annapolis in a May baseball game, Pennington said, accidentally shot a bullet into the water tower. University officials patched up the hole temporarily but decided to drain the tower for a full repair on Nov. 29, when most of the students would be home for Thanksgiving.
They tried to form a bucket brigade, but the distance between the pond, now McKeldin Mall, and the burning buildings was too great for the small buckets to be of any help.
As a last-ditch attempt, the students and a janitor threw water onto the Science Building to keep it cool and wet as the fire approached it — an effort that was successful in saving what is now known as Morrill Hall. There are rumors that today, if you sit quietly in the attic, you can smell smoke and hear the cadets marching and shouting outside.
Despite their small victory, almost nothing was left of the school. The buildings were in ruins, and what wasn’t easily carried to safety by students was pilfered by looters.
“It was just wiped out. The whole thing was wiped … Nobody had any uniforms or anything,” Edwin Powell, a junior during the fire, said in a 1973 eyewitness account.
Miraculously, everyone survived. Local families took students in and offered them clothes to wear.
But within days of the fire, then-college President Richard W. Silvester, who had spent years helping the school grow into a prestigious farming and engineering institution, resigned in despair, citing “illness” as his official reason for leaving.
The Post estimated that the damage cost $150,000 — about $3.6 million today. None of it was covered by insurance.
By Dec. 2, 1912, all the students assembled at the site, along with their teachers and administrators. With the help of alumni eager to begin rebuilding and reforming the Maryland Agricultural College, the university was almost entirely rebuilt from the ground up.
“It was a very devastating event. There was some doubt that the college would reopen, but there was a lot of determination to reopen, so it moved forward,” Turkos said. “It was an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.”
