Jessica Bliss

USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee

Our city’s most disastrous fire started with a boy, a burning ball of yarn and a wind of remarkable force.

In a cabin at the corner of First and Oldham streets, the story goes, a young boy's ball — simple ravelings of an old yarn sock — landed in a red-hot stove. The boy, in what The Nashville Tennessean later pronounced as “a desperate effort to save his toy,” snatched it from the grate and threw it out the door.

In the yard where it landed, the grass — dry and overgrown — ignited. Wind gusts whipped the flames. And in less than five hours on a blustery day 100 years ago this week, disaster blackened the east bank of the Cumberland River and forever changed the composition and identity of the city.

For years, the neighborhoods of East Nashville were the place to be, a country haven close to downtown. Like today, it was a trendy part of town for Nashvillians. But after the fire, things changed. East bank neighborhoods, abandoned, isolated and all but ignored, declined and nearly went dormant — waiting to be rekindled.

It took nearly a century, but the east bank of our river-divided city is having a revival.

"It’s a real phoenix, isn’t it?" said Jim Hoobler, senior curator of art and architecture at Tennessee State Museum. "It literally was burned up and came back."

Every available firefighting apparatus in the city responded to the fire on March 22, 1916. The blaze did not abate. It swept first to the basement of the Seagraves & Co. planing mill, where, in a flash, the building and the pine lumber within it flared.

The fire consumed electric poles. Live wires fell. House shingles burned loose, carried by the wind over rooftops to start other fires.

The blaze raged through Edgefield, scorching every garage, outhouse and servants cabin and laying waste to 35 blocks of mostly residential property. It consumed Little Sisters of the Poor, which cared for the elderly and needy in the city; Warner School, the second-largest grammar school in Nashville; and several places of worship in the heart of the church district.

Fire Chief Antonio Alonzo Rozetta and Engine Company No. 4 were putting out a dump fire at a chemical plant on First Street when they first saw smoke rolling up from the roof of Seagraves mill, just 500 yards away from where they worked.

The chief said the high winds of the morning brought on a premonition of the fire. He ordered every engine to remain at their fire houses and asked the captains to hold all their men “in readiness for a possible big one.”

But he didn’t count on anything this big. He didn’t imagine he would call out every apparatus in the department. He didn’t factor in the 50 mph winds or the diminishing of water pressure. He didn’t prepare for the helplessness of “the most loyal and hardest working set of men that ever ate smoke.”

“The odds were against us from the very beginning.”

Before the No. 4 company could even make a run from the chemical plant to the mill, four houses around the mill were aflame. The electric light and signal wires were falling into the street. The first call box one of the firefighters tried was dead. He ran to another at the corner of Bridge Avenue and Woodland Street while the company began hooking hoses to hydrants.

The flames spread swiftly up Oldham Street to Putnam and across the railroad tracks through the then-vacant lots. Houses on Main Street began to burn. From where the chief stood, it looked like the entire block had simultaneously broken into flames. The only hope in saving the city, he said, was to keep the fire in as narrow a path as possible.

For three hours, the men battled the inferno. The No. 5 engine, a vehicle called John M. Lea after a retired Nashville judge, had to be abandoned when the fire came too close. The streets didn’t serve as a fire break. Instead, flames moved diagonally across square blocks. Some families climbed into their wagons, holding boards over their heads to protect them from the cinders falling out of the sky as they made their way to the bridge to cross the river.

Many residents fought with bucket brigades and garden hoses. Every available stream of water pumped into burning buildings, “as fast as the equipment would permit.” The force remained futile against the fire, which forged ahead. It consumed St. Columba's Church and Woodland Street Christian Church behind it before jumping across Woodland to the Presbyterian church.

Warner School, on the corner of Russell and Seventh streets, caught the blaze first on a window sash. At the time, it served as the second-largest grammar school in the city — an eye-catching three-story, red brick building with 23 classrooms that housed 1,000 students.

Children filed safely out, but the building reached a worse fate. The building’s majestic clock tower ignited. It stood, unstably, until explosives brought it down the next day.

The fire ate a path three blocks wide and more than two miles long. Nearly 650 buildings burned. Churches and a school smoldered in ruin. Three thousand people in the city’s most affluent neighborhood became homeless.

In 1916, Edgefield, as local historian and author Ridley Wills tells it, stood as the city’s “most elegant suburb.”

We were, as a country, on the brink of war, but at that time the wealthy still lived well. Some of the most well-to-do families in the city settled on the east bank. H.G. Hill opened his first grocery store there. Dr. John Shelby — a prominent physician of Shelby Avenue and Shelby Park fame — built his two daughters each a mansion there, naming one Boscobel and the other Fatherland.

There were handsome trees. It was considered a country retreat despite its close proximity to downtown.

Afterward, it mirrored nothing of that bucolic setting. It looked instead like an ashy wasteland.

For two days, the fire department subsisted on little but coffee and ham sandwiches as it put out lingering embers. Newspapers across the country ran stories about the conflagration. Throngs of sightseers flocked to East Nashville the day after the fire, the largest crowd gathering at 3:30 p.m. to witness the dynamiting of the Warner School tower.

The streets were roped off for a block in each direction.

As many as 10,000 watched as the more than 100-foot-tall tower — with 15 holes drilled at its base and 600 pounds of dynamite tamped in place — crumbled to the ground.

There was a puff of white smoke and the roar of an explosion as the once-magnificent entrance to the school collapsed.

Bits of broken brick hurled through the air, hitting one priest in the forehead. He was not seriously injured.

In fact, only one person died in the blaze.

Black prisoners walked the streets helping remove personal belongings from still smoldering buildings, and having "risked their lives in this dangerous undertaking" they were "given their liberty," the paper reported.

In the weeks that followed, personal ads in the newspaper announced the locations of displaced families like Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Wallace and their sons, who took up post-fire residence at the Hotel Hermitage.

Ads for insurance companies and fire extinguishers dominated the newspaper. The American National Bank touted the safe deposit boxes in its “modern burglar and fire-proof vault.” Singer Sewing Machine Co. placed an announcement that it would cancel any balance due to machines lost in the fire.

Civic leagues joined together to propose an extension of the fire prevention zone to East Nashville, the widening of Woodland Street, and the placement of a park in the area devastated by flames.

“East Nashville, though staggered by the frightful blow last Wednesday, will reassert its inherent strength, and, great and heavy as the burden has been, it may yet prove a blessing in disguise,” The Tennessean quoted Dr. William Lunsford as saying.

It may have been that blessing, but not before a great exodus of affluence. Already the transition began several decades earlier. Though it scouted several east side locations, Vanderbilt chose not to build its university there, buying instead on the other side of the river. The centennial celebration took place on the West End, and a new golf and country club also went west.

Instead of rebuilding after the fire, many of the area’s wealthiest residents moved, too, to the other side of the river. Property, cheap and plentiful, sat poised for developers to pounce.

"The fire just confirmed that East Nashville was no longer the place to be," said Michael Fleenor, former historic preservation specialist at the Tennessee Historical Commission and author of “East Nashville (Images of America).”

And though they didn’t know it then, the migration may have spared many of the displaced East Nashville residents more tragedy. The fire became the first of three major disasters — followed by the flood of 1927 and the tornado of 1933 — that forever changed the landscape of East Nashville, transforming it from the most affluent area of the city.

It was a "one, two, three punch to East Nashville," says attorney and avid local historian David Ewing.

"It was devastating."

8 of Nashville's worst disasters

The city, and the east bank neighborhoods, would eventually recover and evolve. But it happened so slowly. The rich moved to Belle Meade. Modest bungalows and cottages replaced the rows of commanding Victorian and Queen Anne townhomes. Large, stately abodes turned into crowded boarding houses with tales of red lights shining out the top story windows. By midcentury, East Nashville, like so many urban neighborhoods, really started to suffer. Interstate construction began, and those who stayed through the tragedy had new routes to the suburbs.

There were bad times, terrible times, when crime and crumbling infrastructure were all that East Nashville became.

"Being across the river provides a sort of isolation," Fleenor said. "In some ways that neighborhood was forgotten."

But eventually, new residents saw promise in the aging homes that long ago slowly arose out of the ash. People began to refurbish. Rough neighborhoods of the later 1900 decades began to transition. Artists and entrepreneurs moved in, and the east side got a fresh coat of color and creativity.

There's a spark there now, maybe even one that lingers from long ago. It seems possible that flames sustain.

Even seven months after that March day in 1916 when disaster hit, the fire still burned.

Workmen clearing debris uncovered smoldering coals in a cellar on Fatherland Street, under the residence formerly occupied by the Rev. William Lunsford, pastor of Edgefield Baptist Church.

The embers, spectators reported, burned strong enough to light a cigar.

No one mentioned if they also would ignite a ball of yarn.

East Nashville: What became of the old neighborhood

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.