Cloquet Fire: It Was a Day to Remember…

By Jim Heffernan

* Note: Today marks the 100th anniversary of the 1918 fires. 
What follows is my column that was originally printed in the 
Duluth News Tribune and re-printed in my book, Cooler, Near the Lake.

Today marks the 70^thanniversary* of the great Cloquet fire that burned much of Northeastern Minnesota and killed hundreds of people. The ranks of those who remember it first-hand are getting thin, although there are still plenty of people in their late 70s and older around to tell about it.

Mention of the Cloquet fire brings vivid memories to me. While I missed it by more than two decades, my mother, Ruth Carlson, was age 19 and not yet married on that Oct. 12, 1918, and talked of it often when I was growing up.

Everybody who was in this area then had a story to tell about that terrible day. Many have passed the stories down through their families. This is my mother’s Cloquet fire, as she told the story often, once, a couple of years before she died in 1983, into a tape recorder.

They say that to a foot soldier huddled in a foxhole in combat the war is only as big as that foxhole. So it is with witnesses of cataclysmic events. We only see a small part and only after they are over do we learn of their scope.

My mother’s Cloquet fire story started in downtown Duluth and ended in her home on Piedmont Avenue between Third and Fourth streets in the West End. Here, in her words, is the way it was–for her.

“It was a very lovely sunshiny day. It was a Saturday and I had baked several loaves of bread. My friend and I went downtown in the afternoon to look for a birthday gift for another friend. We left about 2:30 and went to Wahl’s store, which was George A. Gray Co. then.

“(After shopping) when we came out on Superior Street a terrific wind was blowing and it was very dark. We boarded a streetcar and coming up Piedmont Avenue we met trucks with people on them screaming. Balls of fire were rolling down the avenue, paper and other debris burning. We were frightened and hurried to our homes. (At that point) we hadn’t heard what had happened.

“The wind was so strong you could hardly breathe. I got home and my family was very excited. My mother had died in April so it was my father and five (younger) sisters wondering where to go. People were driving down Piedmont Avenue in trucks and cars, screaming. They had been picked up in Hermantown where everything was on fire.

“Soon a friend of ours called and told us to pack clothes and a little food and be ready to flee down to the bay because Duluth was surrounded by fire and (he said) the bridge crossing to Superior was burning. The Woodland area was also burning. A neighbor came over crying and wringing her hands because her three children were visiting in Lakewood with their grandmother. She didn’t know if they were alive.

“Then we heard they had ordered the people from Twelfth to Tenth streets and the area all around there to vacate. There was so much smoke we could hardly breathe. The rooms were filled with smoke. They called my dad and asked if he would take the grocery truck from where he worked to Hermantown to pick up people. He couldn’t leave us alone.

“(Later in the evening) my younger sisters were sleeping and my dad and I were up watching. About 2 o’clock in the morning the wind died down. We were saved–how thankful we were. My friend and I walked up to Hermantown the next day. What a sight we saw–people weeping standing in front of ash piles that had been their homes…so much sickness,too…the people were dying from the flu. (The fire occurred during the great Spanish flu epidemic.) It was not a pretty sight to see beautiful trees and vegetation all black, but the people were brave and went back to their small farms and started to build again.

“It was a day to remember.”

I have one other family account of that fire. My father (who had not yet met my mother) was in the Army (World War I was winding down), stationed in San Francisco. He knew nothing of the fire in his hometown until newspapers reported it with front page headlines proclaiming such things as “Duluth Leveled By Fire.”

It was some time before he could determine his own parents and siblings back in Duluth had survived, and most of Duluth itself had not burned.

Originally appeared in the Duluth News Tribune on Wednesday, October 12, 1988 

and reprinted in the book by Jim Heffernan, Cooler Near the Lake (2008).

*  To learn more about the 1918 fire... click HERE, HERE and HERE.

A West End Story, Part 2: Daughters of a star-crossed couple persevere after being orphaned

By Jim Heffernan

This is the rest of the West End Story about the lives of my Swedish immigrant grandparents in Duluth 100 years ago, their six daughters and the couple’s early deaths, leaving their children to fend for themselves.

To reiterate a bit, it told the story of Charles and Anna Carlson, both of whom had emigrated from Sweden at a relatively young age and how they met and married in Duluth and started their family. Their first child was my mother, Ruth, born in 1899. Only 18 years later and with five more daughters added to the family, Anna died at age 38 in 1917. When they lost their mother, the Carlson girls ranged in age from 19 (Ruth, the eldest) to the youngest, Dagmar, just five years old. Only two years later, their father died at age 47. 

Bethany Lutheran Church, 2308 W. 3rd St.
The church of my youth and the church
that kept my mother's siblings together after their parents' death

Most of what I know about their early lives was told to me by my mother. I only witnessed the adult lives of the six daughters. In 1919, at the time of Charles’ death, Ruth was serving as organist at Bethany Swedish Lutheran Church in the West End, having been appointed to the position when the regular organist was killed on a battlefield in France during World War I. Innately talented, she also had studied piano and organ.

With the parents gone, Ruth became the head of the family along with her next sister, Lillette, who at 17 shared family responsibilities of caring for the younger children. Then came Elsa, just 12 when their mother died, followed by Mildred, who was at 7, Marion, 6, and Dagmar, almost two years younger. 

The Carlson girls stayed in the small frame home their parents had established at 1925 Piedmont Avenue, an address that no longer exists but is located near Piedmont and Fourth Street.

These orphaned youngsters were taken under the wing of the Bethany church congregation, with members and leaders offering charitable help and support as the older girls struggled to rear their younger sisters. Offers came to adopt two of the younger girls–Mildred and Dagmar–but Ruth said she could not bring herself to let them leave the family. Dagmar, the youngest of the brood, was taken in for a time by what was described as a “rich” family in East End seeking to adopt her, but her oldest sisters couldn’t let her go, and she returned to the Piedmont Avenue home. Rather than break up the family, Mildred and Dagmar for a time stayed during the week at Bethany Home, the orphanage on north 40th Avenue West, and came home on weekends.

Bethany Children's Home, 1922

That left the problem of Marion, and a problem it was. She was born developmentally disabled, severely retarded in the parlance of the day, as well as epileptic. Her condition couldn’t be dealt with at home without parents, Ruth told me, and the decision was made to send her to a state institution at Faribault, Minnesota, as was commonly done in that era. (She remained institutionalized for the rest of her life, with many visits to Duluth for “vacation” and regular visits to the institution by her sisters. She died in her mid-50s.)

Before too long in the 1920s, the second and third daughters reached an age where they were able to work. Lillette got a job at Freimuth’s Department Store in downtown Duluth, located for many years on the southwest corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street. After a period of time staying at home tending the younger children while Ruth and Lillette worked, Elsa also went to work at Freimuth’s.

In addition to her paid position as Bethany organist and choir director, Ruth was self-employed as a piano instructor in West End homes. At first she went to students’ homes to give lessons, making daily rounds by city streetcar and walking when possible. Later she brought students into her home.

Thus their lives progressed in the 1920s, making ends meet, never wanting for nourishment or shelter, young women and girls growing into womanhood with each passing year. Soon Mildred too went to work, at a laundry. None of them were able to finish high school; all were confirmed at Bethany with formal portraits commemorating the occasion.

By the late 1920s, both Lillette and Elsa had married, each having a child in 1929. Ruth stayed in the family home with the remaining sisters, who eventually expanded their own horizons by following Elsa and her husband and young daughter in a move to Chicago in the early 1930s. Finally, when the others’ lives were settled, Ruth married my father, George, in 1932, starting a new life that brought into the world two sons, my older brother and me. Throughout, she remained minister of music at Bethany Lutheran, accompanying the transition from Swedish language worship to English. 

Ruth Carlson Heffernan, circa 1920's

All of her sisters preceded her in death in the 1960s and ‘70s and were laid to rest at Bethany Cemetery in Hermantown, three of them in the same plot where Charles and Anna were buried decades before, and two elsewhere in the same cemetery.

That left two empty gravesites in the original family plot, one of which welcomed my father in 1971. Ruth lived on, alone in our family home on 23rd Avenue West a few blocks up the hill from Bethany church, and continued her music duties at Bethany until 1976 when she retired.

Age was beginning to show, even as her younger sisters passed away, one by one. She lived until 1983, dying at the age of 84. The last six months of her life were difficult for her and she ended up at Lakeshore Lutheran Home, a place where over the years she had often been asked to provide music for Christmas programs and other events.

Unable to express herself well due to aphasia brought on by her medical condition, she seemed to resign herself to her inevitable fate. Several of us gathered with her in a recreation room at Lakeshore on Independence Day in her last year. By then she was in a wheelchair, but with a piano in the room she indicated she’d like to play. She was wheeled to the keyboard, and placing her age-gnarled fingers on the keys, she formed the familiar chords of the patriotic anthem, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” playing it beautifully, with the expression she had always demonstrated at the piano. It was the last time she played a piano, an instrument that, along with the pipe organ, had sustained her her entire life.

Three months later, she was lowered into the last grave in the family plot at Bethany Cemetery, alongside my father and down from star-crossed Charles and Anna, now with all of their daughters nearby. The original family had finally come together again. 

Thus ends this West End story, only one of so many involving the struggles of early settlers of that neighborhood and throughout Duluth around the turn of the last century, but the one I know best.  

This story of my mother's life growing up in Duluth's West End (now called Lincoln Park) first published in Zenith City Online in July, 2014

My West End Story conclusion...

Ruth Carlson Heffernan, circa 1920's

Last month I wrote a part one segment of what I called a "West End Story" in my monthly post on Zenith City Online. This month I wrote the conclusion to the story, titled, "A West End Story, Part 2: Daughters of a star-crossed couple persevere after being orphaned."

Anna & Charles Carlson with my mother
and three of her five sisters circa 1910

I received so many calls, private notes and online comments asking me to write the rest of the story that I decided to write the conclusion of this remarkable saga of young girls orphaned by the untimely deaths of both parents in in the early twentieth century. The oldest of these six daughters of Charles and Anna Carlson was my mother, Ruth Carlson Heffernan, and this story is a very personal tale of her early life.

If you'd like to read the conclusion to this story that took place in the late 19th century and early twentieth century, you can link HERE to my post in Zenith City Online. (There's a link embedded in that story to part 1, if you haven't read the first part of the story.) I think you'll find the tale of my Swedish immigrant grandparents and the struggles of my mother and her sisters reflecting the era and likely paralleling so many stories of that period of time.

My Swedish immigrant roots: A Duluth West End Story

Anna & Charles Carlson with four of their six daughters.
Ruth Carlson Heffernan is on the left behind her mother.
Photo taken around 1910~Jim Heffernan photo

Saga beginning in Sweden ends tragically for one family...

Some of you readers of my blog also follow me on Zenith City Online (an online site filled with engaging highlights of Duluth and area history–including my monthly posts about growing up in Duluth's western environs).

Just in case you haven't yet discovered this most interesting web site, I'm linking my latest post on ZCO about my Swedish immigrant grandparents (on my mother's side). It's titled, "A West End Story" and represents just one segment of the intriguing saga of my mother's family while settling in this area. You'll find my post HERE and discover more about our area history on Zenith City Online.

Charles Carlson circa 1910
Jim Heffernan photo