Thomas Mayberry Hero of the Kirkwood Hotel Fire

The Kirkwood Hotel at the turn of the century

There were roughly 150 people in the Kirkwood Hotel in Des Moines when it caught fire early on April 5, 1929. Six people died in the inferno. A dozen more were hospitalized. Several jumped from fourth-floor windows trying to escape. They didn’t make it.

 

A night clerk told investigators he put out a small fire in a linen closet at 2:15 a.m. Forty-five minutes later, the fire was back. When he tried to reach it, the smoke stopped him.

 

Porter Thomas Mayberry turned in the alarm around 3 a.m. “I went back to wake people up,” he said. “Women and men were screaming and moaning, and the smoke was terrible.”

Mrs. Kenneth Bowman Saved Her Children From A Barn Fire

Mrs Kenneth Brown and her children

Maquoketa, Iowa. July 9, 1930. It started like any other morning. Mrs. Kenneth Bowman was doing her chores when she realized her three boys and her little sister, Cora Beth—had climbed into the hayloft to see a baby pigeon.

Then the loft burst into flames. No warning, no time for panic. She just ran—pulled Warren Lee, Owen, little Neale, and Cora Beth out of the smoke one by one, moving on instinct while the heat snapped behind her.

People tried to make sense of it afterward. Investigators said someone had used dynamite to break apart the tightly packed hay so it would burn faster. It sounded impossible until you saw how fast the fire moved.

By the time the flames died, seven buildings were gone. Only the farmhouse, the separator shed, and a barn across the road were still standing.

Neighbors called Mrs. Bowman a hero. She probably didn’t feel like one, but those kids are alive because she didn’t stop to think.

Davenport Iowa Train Wreck November 1919

Two trains on the Rock Island line collided five miles west of Davenport just after dawn on November 20, 1919.

When help reached the site, the wreck looked unreal. Seven cars were thrown off the tracks—some half-buried in the dirt, others twisted into crooked piles. A cattle car had exploded into splinters. Thirty head of cattle lay dead or dying, their moans drifting across the fields. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the pitiful sounds could be heard for blocks.

 

How the three-man crew lived through it was a mystery.

 

Engine No. 2529, run by engineer Thorpe, had been crushed into a tangle of iron. The fireman crawled out first on his hands and knees, shaking and scraped raw but alive. A witness said he looked like a man clawing his way out of the jaws of something that meant to kill him.

The Day the Music Died February 3, 1959

Buddy Holly

February 3, 1959. Clear Lake, Iowa. The air felt like glass. You could see your breath in the headlights. Inside the Surf Ballroom, it was — sweat, perfume, and static.

 Buddy Holly hit the stage in a gray suit and black-rimmed glasses. He opened with “Gotta Travel On.” The crowd roared. Ritchie Valens followed with “Donna,” smiling through the flu. The Big Bopper — J.P. Richardson — lumbered across the stage, wiping his brow, booming out “Chantilly Lace.”

 

Carroll Anderson, the ballroom manager, said, “They were in good spirits. Buddy was joking; Ritchie was nervous but happy. Nobody was thinking about the weather.”

 

Outside, the temperature was ten below. Snow whipped across the lot. The tour bus was parked near the back, with a dead heater, iced windows, smelling like old socks and diesel.

Rockdale Iowa Flood of 1876

Centennial parade in Dubuque, Iowa, July 4, 1876

It was America’s hundredth birthday — a loud, sweaty carnival of self-congratulation. Dubuque was drunk on patriotism and beef fat. Main Street looked like a fever dream of George Washington with arches everywhere, bunting flapping, men in hats shouting nonsense about liberty. “Hayden’s Battery preceded the car of 1776,” somebody wrote, as if that meant anything. Every man was a patriot, every woman a flag, and every kid sticky with pie and gunpowder.

 The Germania Band blared while Holman’s Cavalry clomped down the avenue, followed by grim men pretending this was still about freedom and not about eating their body weight in ribs. Fireworks cracked overhead, and somewhere a brass band struck up something heroic and off-key. It was all very grand, very human, very doomed.

 

Then, as it always does, nature got bored. The sky rolled its eyes and said, enough already. A few polite raindrops fell on the arms of drunks and dancers. Nothing serious, just a quiet warning from the gods. Nobody listened. They never do. They mounted up and rode home to Rockdale, two miles west — a one-saloon village tucked in a gorge, the place where lightning likes to linger.

Lost Creek Mine Disaster Oskaloosa, Iowa

Horrified look on trapped miners faces as the air caught fire, 
and the timbers came crashing down.

It happened in 1902, in a place called Lost Creek — which, come to think of it, is a terrible name for a coal mine. You’d think someone might’ve taken the hint. Lost things rarely come back.

Sunday morning near Oskaloosa, Iowa. The miners went down like they always did — coughing, joking, swearing, thinking about breakfast. Regular men with soot in their lungs and hope in their pockets. At seven o’clock, the air exploded.

A miner’s powder charge hit a pocket of gas. Methane. Firedamp, they called it — sounds harmless, doesn’t it? Twenty men dead, fourteen burned and half-blind but alive. The Oskaloosa Herald said the mine “belched smoke and dust like the breath of hell.”

The Consol Coal Company said it was tragic. Unforeseen. Deeply regretted. Nobody said “avoidable.” The mine was a firetrap — with coal dust everywhere, weak ventilation, and open flame lamps. A paycheck wrapped in dynamite.