Christmas, 1870: the Spotswood Hotel Fire

1870 was a hell of a year for Richmond. It began with the recovery of full status under the Federal government as a state, and the city was finally free of the designation, “Military District Number 1” as it had been officially called since the end of the Civil War five years before. That boost in confidence was short-lived. In April, a courtroom in the Capitol collapsed, killing 62 people, creating a disaster of national notice. There was a prolonged summer drought that followed, and then when the clouds finally broke, a torrential rain in the western part of Virginia drove a wall of water into Richmond. “Mayo’s Bridge was washed away once more,” recalled Richmond historian Virginius Dabney, “…and the surging water carried away homes, mills, timbers, furniture, and trees downstream.” Certainly, not everybody in Richmond was devastated by the news of the death of Robert E. Lee in October 1870, but in the golden glow of the Lost Cause and among the many white people and Confederate veterans in Richmond, his demise was considered quite a blow.

 

The Spotswood Hotel sat on the southeast corner of Eighth and Main streets in Richmond.

 

During the war, the Spotswood Hotel was considered one of the premier hotels in Richmond and became a hive of activity during the Civil War. It opened just before the outbreak of the war in 1861, and a vast cast of characters roamed the hotel’s halls during the war. Robert E. Lee stayed at the Spotswood, as did Jefferson Davis. Diplomats and Generals, paroled prisoners of war, and members of the Confederate Congress all padded down the hallways and met in the restaurant and the bar. Spies, slave traders, Union sympathizers and war profiteers all rubbed elbows at the Spotswood. Union General George McCall, captured during the war, wrote to his family he was under arrest at the Spotswood Hotel and treated well. The five-story hotel survived the Evacuation Fire at the end of the war and at Eighth and Main was only a few blocks from the edge of the burned district where flames had consumed so much of the city. After order was restored in Richmond, the hotel hosted its first Federal officers in rooms where Confederate politicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats once roamed.

 

1870 still had one more blow to deliver to Richmond in the very last days of that momentous year. Early on a bitterly cold Christmas morning, a fire started at the Spotswood Hotel and rapidly spread through the building. At 2:00 AM, Patrick Boyd, the nightwatchman, detected the smell of smoke near the hotel pantry. The door was locked, but by the time it was broken down the room was full of flames. Someone was sent to sound the fire alarm, but the fire rapidly spread. A strong wind fanned the flames, endangering the adjoining buildings. By 5:00 AM the fire was under control, but the Spotswood Hotel and a building behind it were completely destroyed. Dozens of guests stood on the street in the bitter cold, having lost all their clothes and possessions, and frantic relatives searched their faces for the missing. One hotel guest emerged from the smoke wearing only what he described as a “very short shirt” and a hat. “I put on my hat to keep my hair from burning,” he explained, “but did not have time to put on my pants.” He later found his trunk on the sidewalk and wrote to a friend that in order to conduct his business in Richmond he now had only $200, one shirt, two pairs of pants, a vest, and the hat he was wearing when the fled the burning hotel.  

 

Early in the morning of Christmas Day in 1870, the Spotswood Hotel was completely destroyed by fire.

 

The next morning’s edition of the Richmond Dispatch did an admirable job of describing the fire and recounting the lives lost in the blaze. Among them was Samuel Robinson, a cigar salesman, who was spotted at a fifth-floor window. Beds were piled in the street and Robinson was urged to jump, but terrified by the height, he instead died in the flames. Mrs. Emily Kennealy was the housekeeper at the Spotswood, and when spotted amid the confusion inside the building was urged to flee. “But, anxious to save her effects, she heeded not the entreaties of her friend, and perished in the devouring elements.”

 

H. A. Thomas “seems to have been killed beyond doubt,” reported the Richmond Dispatch. Thomas was traveling through Richmond in his capacity as the agent for the Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress panorama. For Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, these traveling panoramas were high-tech entertainment of the grandest order. Painted in 1850, Pilgrim’s Progress was a canvas painting 8 feet tall and 900 feet long and was slowly reeled past viewers as a sort of animated allegorical tale of the main character, named Christian, on his journey from earth to heaven. In Richmond, it was exhibited at Metropolitan Hall, and seeing it “really affords a most delightful, and at the same time, innocent, way of passing a couple of hours.” When the panorama was packed up for its next venue and left Richmond, it was without its advance man, Mr. Thomas.

 

Among the most lamented losses in the fire was that of Samuel Hines, who emerged from the hotel trying to get people to go back and help him save his friend E. W. Ross. When nobody would help him, Hines raced back into the burning building. He emerged in a window several floors above the street and cried for help. Again, bedding was piled in the street, but before Hines or his friend Ross could jump, the window where Hines stood was engulfed in flames and minutes later, the floor collapsed. “Generous and charitable to a fault,” said the Dispatch gravely of Hines’ character, “he fell a sacrifice upon the altar of friendship.”

 

The story of the death of Hines in his effort to save his friend Ross took on a grander significance in that both belonged to the Knights of Pythias, a popular fraternal organization whose tenants of loyalty and self-sacrifice were the essence of Hines’ actions. In the golden age of fraternal organizations, the Knights of Pythias (which still exists) was quite popular, and there were both white and “colored” lodges of the Knights in Richmond. They took their name from the ancient Greek legend of Damon and Pythias. Pythias volunteered as a hostage for Damon, each pledging his life to save the other, and the pair became synonymous with duty and brotherly sacrifice. Hines was termed by his lodge brothers a “Pythian martyr” and the story of Hines, Ross, and the burning of the Spotswood Hotel became legendary.

 

Richmonders flock to view the ruins of the Spotswood Hotel the morning after the fire. The fire took place on one of the coldest nights of 1870 - note the icicles on the adjoining buildings

 

Three days later the ruins of the Spotswood Hotel still smoldered, and water was sprayed on the still hot bricks so the remaining towering walls could be pulled down for safety. Bodies were recovered, and in the end eight people were thought to have died although an exact account was impossible because of several travelers who passed through the Spotswood and who could not be accounted for.  The same day, the funeral for Hines’ friend, Erastus Ross, was held at Monumental Church. He was buried in Shockoe Cemetery, and his weathered tombstone with its masonic symbols still describes how Ross died:

In Memory of

Erastus W. Ross

Who lost his life in the fire

that consumed the Spotswood Hotel

On the right is the grave marker of Samuel Hines’ friend Erastus Ross, in Richmond’s Shockoe Cemetery.

 

Even as poignant as Ross’ tombstone is with its recollection of the destruction of the hotel, there is still in Richmond an even sadder and more pathetic memorial concerning the Spotswood Hotel fire. Just inside the gate of Oakwood Cemetery and not a lot more than 18 inches tall, the visitor sees what looks like the marker for the grave of a child. It recalls the disaster that overtook Richmond on that cold Christmas night and the tiny marker, now broken diagonally, is inscribed, “To The Memory of The Victims of the Spotswood Disaster December 25, 1870.” Several metal pins have been put in the marble to try and hold the pieces together, demonstrating various campaigns to preserve the marker, although few people who now notice the little monument probably know to what “Spotswood” it refers. 

 

The small, broken marker in Oakwood Cemetery commemorates the loss of life in the Spotswood Hotel fire.

 

Any remnant of the once grand Spotswood has been erased by several generations of buildings at the desirable southeast corner of Eighth and Main. Today the site is occupied by an undistinguished tall structure built in 1964, known as the “Wytestone Plaza.” The memory of what happened at Eighth and Main one cold Christmas 150 years ago, the terror, the heroism, and the loss of life at the Spotswood Hotel fire has faded from the long history of Richmond.

- Selden.