The Italian Hall and the Calumet Theatre
Christmas Eve 1913 in Calumet was meant to be a time of laughter, fun and presents for union miners and their families. There'd been a labor strike on for five months at that point, and it was high time for a little holiday cheer. The women's union group knew it, so it organized a massive holiday party for that night, held upstairs at the Italian Hall, a large red brick building at the corner of Elm and Seventh Streets.
More than six hundred people packed into the building for the festivities. The majority were children, either with their parents, their siblings or their friends. At the start, it was a fabulous time. The children sang Christmas carols, dancing and laughing with their friends. Santa had just come in, and kids were pushing to the stage to receive their gifts from under the big Christmas tree. Sadly, those presents would never make their way home.
Shortly after Santa arrived, a large bearded man pushed open the door to the hall and screamed, "Fire!" The spark of fear moved fast, and suddenly everyone was rushing to the one exit: a narrow staircase heading down to the front door of the building. The fire escape mostly went unnoticed in the mayhem. Terror propelled the revelers forward, shoving and pushing to the door, knocking over and trampling smaller bodies and the adults who stooped to pick them up. Some were crushed to death against the door of a cloakroom next to the staircase.
But those who made it to the stairs first had the worst fate. In the rush to escape, both children and adults were shoved from the steps and thrown down the stairs, landing against closed doors at the bottom. It continued in that fashion—whoever hit the landing was tossed into the stairway—and bodies piled atop one another. Newspapers at the time reported that the stairwell was filled to the ceiling with suffocating and crushed people. The doors at the bottom never opened to let anyone out.
The mayhem only lasted a few moments before those present realized that there was no fire, but it was long enough for massive casualties. All told, seventy-three people lost their lives that night by crushing or suffocation—fifty-nine children and fourteen adults. The youngest victim was only two years old.
The man who raised the fire alarm was never found. True to the union disputes at the time, rumors swirled that he was wearing an anti-union button. Many thought that he was sent by the mine bosses to break up the party as retaliation for the miners not working. Today, it is still one of the Upper Peninsula's biggest unsolved crimes.
Not much of the Italian Hall remains today, save for the arched doorway that still stands at the same spot, a folding chair from the event space and a single step from the stairs where so many met their fate. The step and chair are part of an exhibit at the Calumet Visitor Center; to place your hand on the step is to make a physical connection with the historic tragedy. You can almost feel the wrenching emotion felt by so many on the night of that party pulsing through your hand as you touch it.
A similar intensity fills the air at the actual site of the hall, where the arched doorway remains as part of a memorial park. Although the building itself is no longer there, the community honors the spirits of the dead inside with seventy-three luminaries, lit every Christmas Eve on a path on the way to the arch.
After the catastrophe, bodies of the dead were moved a block away to the Red Jacket Town Hall and Opera House, now the Calumet Theatre, which worked as a temporary morgue. It took hours to identify all the bodies, compounded by false recognitions from distraught parents amid all the confusion and chaos. Mothers in the street were screaming out for their lost children in the hopes they had survived, while inside, parents were taking away bodies of what they thought were their own children, only to return with the body later after finding theirs alive and well.
More than twenty thousand people came to Calumet for the victims' mass burial on December 28, 1913. Caskets had been shipped in from surrounding towns, and simple pine boxes were also constructed for burials. At the nearby Lakeview Cemetery, striking miners dug trench graves for all the bodies. A handful of local churches hosted funerals. Afterward, everyone filed outside, marching down Pine Street in a massive procession of mourners, with union members carrying caskets of children and horse- drawn hearses holding adult coffins. Thousands walked with the procession to the cemetery, where a multilingual graveside service continued past sunset and into the evening.
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