By James Randall
Visitors approaching Virginia City’s Fourth Ward School today see one of the Comstock’s most distinctive surviving landmarks. What they cannot see is the building that stood there before it.
Beneath and around the school are remnants of the Globe Hotel, a South C Street hotel whose history ended suddenly on June 19, 1876. Shortly after noon that day, smoke appeared above the hotel. Within minutes, flames had broken through the roof. Within roughly forty-five minutes, the Globe and much of the surrounding neighborhood were gone.
The disaster might have been remembered as one more Virginia City fire were it not for what happened next. Only weeks later, the school board was preparing to build a new school on the Globe Hotel property. Before the year was over, the imposing Fourth Ward School was standing on the site.
The hotel disappeared, but not entirely. More than a century later, pieces of it would emerge from the earth beneath the school.
The Globe Hotel on South C Street
The Globe Hotel was not a short-lived establishment created immediately before the 1876 fire. An 1864–65 Virginia City directory lists the Globe Hotel at 211 South C Street, showing that a hotel or boarding establishment under that name was operating in the neighborhood more than a decade before its destruction.
By 1870, the Globe was also being used as a geographic landmark in newspaper descriptions of the southern part of Virginia City. A September 13, 1870 Gold Hill Daily News article discussing construction by the Chollar-Potosi Mining Company referred to buildings situated between Potosi Street and the Globe Hotel. Chollar-Potosi purchased several of those buildings and had them removed from in front of its new office and superintendent’s residence. The account establishes that the hotel stood immediately beside an important part of the mining district.
By 1876, the Globe Hotel belonged to John Kinsman. That ownership is not based on later family tradition. The Daily Territorial Enterprise explicitly identified the property after the fire as:
“The Globe Hotel, owned by John Kinsman.”
The newspaper valued Kinsman’s loss at approximately $8,000, of which $4,250 was insured.
Then came June 19.
Smoke From the Laundry
At about noon on Monday, June 19, 1876, fire broke out in the laundry of the Globe Hotel near the Divide.
The following morning, the Daily Territorial Enterprise devoted a lengthy account to the disaster under the headline “A Forty Thousand Dollar Fire.”
The paper reported that the fire destroyed fifteen to twenty frame buildings in about forty-five minutes. Buildings between C and D streets, extending from Hickey Street south toward the open ground surrounding the Chollar-Potosi office, were swept away. Four additional buildings on the east side of D Street were also destroyed.
People nearby first noticed what appeared to be an unusual amount of smoke coming from a stovepipe. For a moment they apparently wondered whether the pipe was merely burning out. Then a sheet of flame burst through the roof.
The alarm spread across the mining district. Steam whistles at the Chollar-Potosi, Hale & Norcross, Savage, Gould & Curry, and other works sounded, locomotive whistles joined them, and Virginia City’s fire bells began ringing.
The fire moved almost unbelievably fast.
The Enterprise said that scarcely a minute after flames broke through the Globe Hotel roof, three nearby buildings belonging to Miss Julia Ann O’Neill were burning. Houses seemed to ignite one after another. Witnesses compared the effect to “striking off as many matches.”
People in the hotel and nearby lodging houses had little time to save themselves. Some had been asleep when the fire began.
A Neighborhood Becomes a Sea of Flame
Virginia City’s firefighters responded almost immediately.
Monumental Engine Company No. 6, whose firehouse was on the Divide, sent a hose cart carrying about 500 feet of hose ahead of its engine. The hose reached the fire approximately six minutes before the engine itself. A line was connected to the nearest hydrant, but the hose burst soon after water began flowing. The break was repaired and the fight resumed.
The challenge was no longer saving the Globe Hotel. It was preventing a neighborhood fire from becoming another citywide disaster.
Between C and D streets, from Hickey Street south toward the Chollar-Potosi property, the Enterprise described what had become a “sea of flame.” Firefighters attacked it from several directions. Hoses were brought from the north and south, while another line came up from the Hale & Norcross works to the east. Residents with garden hoses turned water onto roofs around the burning district.
At some locations the heat became so severe that firefighters protected themselves with wet blankets or held doors in front of their bodies while directing water into the flames. Their efforts were particularly important along Hickey Street. Had the fire crossed there in strength, the Enterprise believed it might have reached the Hale & Norcross works.
For a time, even the mine works were in trouble. Burning shingles, paper, sparks and cinders showered the Hale & Norcross property. The roof of the works caught fire, as did the office roof. The woodpile ignited several times, and sacks of charcoal also began burning. Colonel James G. Fair was reported working alongside the others, hurling sacks of charcoal away from the danger.
“A Repetition of That of Last October”
The psychological effect of the fire is difficult to understand without remembering what Virginia City had endured only eight months earlier.
The Great Fire of October 1875 had devastated much of the city.
Now people watched another fire race from building to building.
The streets filled with carts, express wagons and other vehicles as residents tried to remove possessions. Furniture was thrown from houses. Crockery and other fragile belongings were smashed in the very effort to save them. Women and children cried in the streets while others hurried about trying to determine what could be rescued.
The Enterprise reported that people feared the fire would become “a repetition of that of last October” and continue until there were no buildings left in its path.
This statement is especially important historically. It establishes beyond doubt that the Globe Hotel fire of June 1876 was a separate fire from the Great Fire of 1875.
This time, however, the firefighters prevailed.
The abundant water supply and concentrated attack finally stopped the flames.
The People Caught Inside
Rumors initially spread that people had died.
One man was reportedly seen falling between two buildings and was thought to have been consumed by the flames. After the fire, however, no body was found. A little girl was also reported missing, but the newspaper believed she was probably the child rescued by Pat Holland, who found a girl on D Street surrounded by overpowering smoke and heat and carried her to safety.
The most detailed account of an injured hotel guest concerned John Shirley, a miner employed at the Consolidated Virginia mine.
Shirley worked the night shift and was sleeping in his room at the Globe Hotel when the commotion awakened him. After realizing that the hotel was on fire, he went back for a trunk containing his money and clothing.
That decision nearly cost him his life.
By the time he reached his doorway with the trunk, fire had overtaken the hall. His only escape was through it. Shirley covered his face with his hands and ran through the smoke and flames.
The Enterprise reported that nearly all the hair on his head was burned away, his whiskers were singed off, and his face and hands were badly blistered. Physicians bandaged most of his face, leaving openings for his eyes, and he was later taken to the county hospital. The attending physician believed he could recover.
Behind the newspaper’s tally of buildings and dollars was a reminder of how quickly an ordinary day could become dangerous in a nineteenth-century city built largely of wood.
What the Fire Cost
Insurance men estimated the overall loss at about $40,000, although some contemporaries placed it as high as $45,000 or $50,000.
Kinsman’s Globe Hotel accounted for an estimated $8,000 of the loss.
Miss Julia Ann O’Neill reportedly lost buildings, furniture and fixtures valued at about $6,000. Mrs. Anna Culligan lost three houses valued at $3,500 and, in an especially unfortunate circumstance, her insurance policy had expired only about two weeks earlier and had not been renewed. Mrs. Catharine Evans lost two dwellings, while Mrs. J. W. Gault lost three houses, including a large new residence that had not yet been occupied.
Others lost houses, furniture, personal belongings and outbuildings.
The exact number of structures destroyed was reported differently in various accounts. The Enterprise, written closest to the event, put the number at fifteen to twenty buildings. A later telegraphic report published elsewhere described the Globe Hotel and about twenty-five dwellings as destroyed. The contemporary local account is therefore the better source for describing the immediate extent of the fire, while recognizing that estimates changed as reports traveled.
From a Burned Hotel to a New School
The Globe Hotel fire occurred at exactly the moment Virginia City was considering a major expansion of its public schools.
The connection between the burned hotel property and the Fourth Ward School is unusually well documented.
A clipping from the July 4, 1876 Daily Territorial Enterprise reports that the school board was considering plans for:
“the new school building on the site of the Globe Hotel lot”
and that purchase of the property, together with additional Kinsman property, had been confirmed by the board.
That report appeared only about two weeks after the fire. The attached contemporary clipping also contains a notice instructing people indebted to John Kinsman, proprietor of the Globe Hotel, to settle their accounts.
Construction of the new Fourth Ward School reportedly began on July 31, 1876. By November 28, Virginia City residents were dedicating their new four-story monument to public education.
The change was remarkably rapid.
In June, the site held a hotel.
In July, the school board was preparing to build there.
By late November, an enormous Second Empire schoolhouse had risen on the property.
The Hotel Beneath the School
For generations, almost everything visible above ground belonged to the Fourth Ward School.
Then, in 2002, construction work near the school’s north tower encountered something older.
Workers uncovered a brick-and-mortar arch, fragments of dinnerware and other materials dating from the 1860s and 1870s. The remains were identified with the old Globe Hotel. Fourth Ward School Museum executive director Barbara Mackey reported that other brick arches remained beneath the property.
The discovery gave physical form to a history that otherwise survived principally in newspapers, directories and property records.
There is also an intriguing but unresolved story associated with the site. Later recollections have suggested that the Globe Hotel may have been affected by underground Chollar-Potosi workings. The surviving material does establish that Chollar-Potosi property was immediately beside the hotel and that underground mining was extensive in the area. It does not, however, provide reliable contemporary evidence that the Globe Hotel itself was sinking or being undermined. That claim should therefore remain unproven rather than being repeated as fact.
A Forgotten Layer of Virginia City
The Globe Hotel has been almost completely overshadowed by the building that replaced it.
That is understandable. The Fourth Ward School survived and became one of Virginia City’s most recognizable landmarks. The Globe did not.
But for at least part of the 1860s and 1870s, travelers and residents knew this piece of South C Street as the site of a hotel. Men slept there between mine shifts. John Kinsman owned it. Chollar-Potosi operated nearby. Then, on an ordinary Monday in June 1876, smoke rose from the hotel laundry and the building disappeared in less than an hour.
Within weeks, Virginia City began giving the ground a new identity.
Today visitors looking at the Fourth Ward School are also looking at the site of the Globe Hotel, even if nothing readily visible announces it. Beneath one of Virginia City’s best-known survivors lie the remains of a building consumed by the kind of disaster that erased so much of the nineteenth-century Comstock.
The school tells the story of what Virginia City built.
The Globe Hotel beneath it tells the story of what the city lost.
References
Daily Territorial Enterprise. “A Forty Thousand Dollar Fire.” Virginia City, Nevada, June 20, 1876. Contemporary account of the June 19 Globe Hotel fire, including its origin in the hotel laundry, the spread of the fire, John Kinsman’s ownership and losses, firefighting efforts, injuries and damage to the surrounding neighborhood.
Daily Territorial Enterprise. Virginia City, Nevada, July 4, 1876, p. 3. School-board report concerning plans for a new school building on the Globe Hotel lot and confirmation of the purchase of the Globe Hotel and adjoining Kinsman property. Contemporary clipping reproduced in the supplied research materials.
Gold Hill Daily News. September 13, 1870. Contemporary report concerning construction of the Chollar-Potosi office and superintendent’s residence and removal of buildings situated between Potosi Street and the Globe Hotel. Cited and summarized in the supplied Globe Hotel research.
Virginia City Directory, 1864–65. Listing for the Globe Hotel, 211 South C Street. Directory evidence reproduced and discussed in the supplied research.
James, Susan. “Short History of Fourth Ward School.” Historic Fourth Ward School Museum. Discusses construction and dedication of the Fourth Ward School in 1876 and its relationship to Virginia City’s expanding educational system.
Historic American Buildings Survey. Fourth Ward School, Virginia City, Storey County, Nevada. HABS NEV-15-21. Documentation identifies the school as an 1876 structure designed by C. M. Bennett and built by Knight and McKay.
Record-Courier. 2002 report on construction and archaeological discoveries at the Fourth Ward School. Describes brick arches, dinnerware and other nineteenth-century material associated with the former Globe Hotel site, as summarized in the supplied research materials.