1945 Virginia Rice Nursing Home Fire

Harriett "Hattie" Malinda Ogburn is my 3rd cousin three times removed. She was born on 29 October 1858 in Kanawha County, West Virginia, to John William and Sarah Ann (Beard) Ogburn. Hattie married Henry Bascom Carroll on 13 July 1881 and moved with him to Lincoln County, West Virginia. Henry was a shoemaker and owned his own shop by 1920. The couple had twins, who died in infancy. Henry died in 1932 and some time after his death Hattie went to live in the Virginia Rice Nursing Home in Huntington, West Virginia.

On 16 November 1945 the Huntington Advertiser reported that a fire had broken out at 4:00 a.m. that morning on the second floor of the nursing home. The article went on to say:

"The inmates, many bedfast, were removed scantily-clad in ambulances to Huntington hospitals for temporary shelter. Some of them were burned slightly. Others, hysterical in the excitement, had to be carried out by force from the blazing home.

Charleston Daily Mail, 16 November 1945

When the firemen and police arrived, wild excitement prevailed in the home, they reported. The residents, terrified, were running about inside screaming and shouting. Captain C C Mayo, acting fire chief, assigned most of the two companies that answered the alarm to rescue work. Patrolmen of the police traffic squad and other officers joined in carrying persons from the home…

A few of the patients suffered from exposure in the chilly air as they were led from the flaming home to waiting ambulances. One senile man wandered barefooted and in a nightgown across the street and had to be brought back…

The interior of the nursing home, once the residence of the late Attorney John W Perry, and later the headquarters of a World War I veterans' organization, was gutted. The loss is partly covered by insurance, according to Mrs Rice, the proprietor."

Even though newspapers across the state initially reported the residents of the nursing home were in satisfactory health after the fire, at least three would go on to die from complications due to the fire and exposure, including Hattie.  She was taken to Memorial Hosptial where she died two days later. The death certificate listed the cause of death as "shock following fire in home." Hattie (Ogburn) Carroll was 87 years old.

Harriett "Hattie" Malinda (Ogburn) Carroll's Death Certificate

Followers of Emanual Swedenborg

I recently read The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family: The Tuckers of Virginia 1752-1830, by Phillip Hamilton on Google Play. The book was about a possible branch of my sister-in-law's Tucker family that came from Bermuda and settled in Virginia just prior to the Revolutionary War. It detailed how the lives of the Virginia planter gentry declined and changed after the war and how the family dealt with those changes. Most of the book focused on St. George Tucker (1752-1827), who married Frances Bland Randolph, his brothers, children, and step-children.

One of his brothers was Nathaniel Tucker (1750-1807). He was born in Bermuda and when he was 20 years old accompanied a brother to Charleston, South Carolina. He left the Colony of South Carolina about 1773 to study medicine in Edinburgh. He later transferred to the University of Leiden in Holland from which he graduated.

Leiden University Library

In 1786 Nathaniel decided to settle in the old mother country in the seaside town of Hull. There he established a modest medical practice, worked in a local charity hospital, and married a serious-minded woman from a modest family named Jane Wood. Together the couple had six children and became devout followers of the Swedish theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg. Nathaniel translated Swedenborg's works for English followers but the effort was not commercially successful. According to Lewis Leary[1], he would not allow his name to be associated with his pioneer translations, though perhaps his greatest claim to memory is that these translations introduced Swedenborg to such talented and thoughtful men Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry James,  and Thomas Carlyle.

Emanuel Swedenborg

Other famous followers of Swedenborg were Helen Keller and Elizabeth Barret Browning.

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Lewis Leary wrote a book entitled, Poems of Nathaniel Tucker. He was the former William Rand Kenon Jr Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.