The Aveline fire: a cause no record names

MAY 3, 1908 · ORIGIN UNDETERMINED

Early on Sunday morning, May 3, 1908, the Aveline House, Francis Aveline's great brick hotel at the southeast corner of Calhoun and Berry streets, burned to a shell. It was the largest hotel in the region when it was built in 1860–1863, and its fire remains the deadliest in the city's history: eleven dead by the next-day wire count carried in the New York Times of May 4, twelve in B. J. Griswold's 1921 telling and in the History Center's — a disagreement this record carries openly in its Fire & Public Safety section rather than settling here. What every account agrees on is the gap at the fire's beginning. Griswold's history of the house, and the genealogical society's page built on it, describe the hotel as "destroyed by fire of unknown origin." No later source in the record this history rests on names a cause, a suspect, or an official determination. Hotels of the era burned from boilers, gas, cigars, and wiring, and all of those are conjecture; the record offers none of them. The trail ends at the phrase itself — unknown origin — which has now stood in print for more than a century.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, "Stories of Old Ft. Wayne — No. 12: Aveline Hotel," Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, July 10, 1921, via the Allen County Genealogical Society's Aveline Hotel page — "destroyed by fire of unknown origin."
2. "11 Die in Fire in Indiana Hotel," The New York Times, May 4, 1908 — the next-day wire account and its count.
3. the Fire & Public Safety section of this history — the fire's full account, with the toll carried at both figures.