The mother of John, Hans and Ole Hanson, boys 13, 15, and 17 years old, has not been heard of.\u00a0 The father has been reported alive but no one here has seen him yet.<\/p>\n
Mrs. Gorman of Hinckley is sick at the Coulson house and is very anxious about her six children.<\/p>\n
Mrs. John Stetten lost a 4-year-old child. When last seen the child was in the care of one Andrew Newson, near Hinckley.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In some cases children, who were assumed to be orphaned, were “adopted” by well-meaning people, leaving desperate parents trying to locate them. Ten-year-old Selma Johnson was taken from the Pilgrim Congregational Church by a woman who said she was a member of the church and was taking Selma to wash, dress and care for her. It was found that the lady did not belong to the church, but it was believed that the girl was found. Little Hilda Peterson was taken from the Bethel in Duluth by a lady who thought she was to be adopted. In the meantime the mother, who could talk little English, was beside herself with worry in Pine City.<\/p>\n
Some happy families were united during the week following the fire, but Mrs. Otto Olson’s experience was not so fortunate. During the fire Mrs. Olson, Hinckley, had become separated from her husband and children when she ran back to their home for blankets. Mrs. Olson found shelter somewhere in Hinckley but was badly burned. She was brought to Pine City, then sent to the Asbury Hospital in Minneapolis for treatment, where she was out of her mind with worry. On September 18, with her face still swathed in bandages, she made her way to the mayor’s office to plead for help in finding her family. Three children answering the description of her own were reported to be in Duluth, and Mrs. Olson was overjoyed. But upon being discharged from the hospital, she discovered that she had been given false information and she alone survived. Coroner Cowan made the following entries for the Olson family:<\/p>\n 186. Olson, Otto – Age 38, married; residence, Hinckley; not identified; supposed to have burned in the swamp, one -half mile north of Hinckley; has wife left. The\u00a0Duluth News Tribune\u00a0<\/em>described the hope turned to despair of the survivors during the week after the fire:<\/p>\n Many of the Hinckley survivors had hoped that friends and relatives left behind might have reached a place of safety. But as the relief parties worked down into the stricken territory and the extent of death’s havoc gradually became known, hope is given up and family reunions have been few and far between. In one case, a bereaved mother and children had still hopes that their bread winner was safe, while the committee had yet to break the sad news that he is among the dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As grievous as was the news of verified deaths of loved ones, at least there was a finality about knowing for certain the fate of missing family members.\u00a0 There were some survivors who were not granted even that consolation. In some cases it was months before bodies were found, and some were never located. Survivors could only assume that a missing relative lay among the unidentified dead.<\/p>\n Culled from:\u00a0From the Ashes: The Story of the Hinckley Fire of 1894<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was a time of terror, crowded with portents of disaster. In France, stars were seen falling by the thousands, in Avignon, a column of fire rose high above the papal palace but burned nothing. The bells of St. Mark’s in Venice rang, although no mortal hand had touched them. The Welsh described the plague as a “rootless phantom which has no mercy,” and indeed, Death was hungry. In Scandinavia, the disease was spread, it was thought, by a pest maiden, who emerged as a flame from the mouths of the dead and flew from house to house. In Lithuania, she could be seen drifting lightly on the wind, touching down here and there. When she alighted, she waved a red scarf into the window or door of the house she had chosen, and all who lived within soon died.<\/p>\n An oft-related story of the time tells of a brave farmer who waited at his window, watching the fields and the road that led to the neighboring villages. At last he spied the maiden, the scarf trailing from her fleshless hand, drifting toward his own house, which stood on the very edge of his village. The white face came closer, until he could see the burning eyes. The maiden drifted to his door, which was bolted, and then to the window where he stood. Her hand reached in toward him, bearing the scarf. He chopped the hand off with his ax, and although he and his family died, his village was saved.<\/p>\n According to the chroniclers, “a third of the world died.” Whole villages vanquished, and birds and foxes nested in the abandoned churches. Fields lay fallow, weed-choked and brown because there was no one left to plow them. Vagabonds thronged the roads, freed from the land by the deaths of overseers and lords of the manors. Now they had no work to do, no place to live and no food to eat. Famine followed plague and war followed famine; the troubles of that sad century seemed to have no limit.<\/p>\n But gradually, as is the way with an epidemic disease, the plague died down. Perhaps the plague maiden was sated. At any rate, for the next several centuries, the populations of Europe suffered no horrors commensurate with those brought by the disease in its early years.<\/p>\n In the bleak winter of 1665, however, and from the mouth of a ghost, came an eerie foretelling, an indication that the scythe of the plague was once more honed and ready to sweep across the land.<\/p>\n It happened in January, in the parish of South Petherwin in Cornwall. The curate there, John Rudall, recorded it in his diary. One afternoon, Rudall wrote, he was summoned to Botathen House, the seat of one of his parishioners, a man named Bligh. Rudall found Bligh in some distress, asking for a private talk. Together the men walked along the paths of a winter-bare garden, and Bligh told a strange tale indeed.<\/p>\n His small son, he said, was haunted. Each morning, when the boy crossed a meadow near the house on his way to school, he was approached by an apparition. The image of a white-faced young woman came toward him, not walking on the grass but drifting in the air a few inches above it. Its eyes were fixed on the boy, and something about its demeanor frightened him so much that he was reluctant to approach the field. [‘Something about its demeanor’ – like maybe it being a GHOST? – DeSpair<\/em>]<\/p>\n Bligh might have dismissed this story as an imaginative schoolboy’s invention except for one detail. The boy recognized the apparition. It was, he claimed, a young woman named Dorothy Dinglet, who had long been a friend of the Bligh family and who had died three years before. Bligh finished his account, and Rudall regarded him in thoughtful silence. Then the curate, a practical man, said that they should go to the meadow, and see for themselves whether the dead indeed walked.<\/p>\n Accordingly, at dawn the next day, the two men went to the spot. The boy walked between them, clutching their hands in fear, and his spaniel trotted alongside. At first, they saw nothing more than the brown, frost-rimmed stubble of wintergrass. But presently, in a far corner of the field, they discerned a faint shape that grew firmer in outline as it approached them. It was truly Dorothy Dinglet, quivering and shifting in the morning light. Her hair, as Rudall later wrote, was so soft that it seemed to melt away as he looked.<\/p>\n The ghost gazed piteously at the curate. He asked it to speak and prove itself no fiend. After a moment, a soft voice said, “Before next Yuletide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from their flesh.” The men shuddered. At their feet, the boy’s spaniel whined once and then was silent.<\/p>\n Using the powers of his office, Rudall eventually gave the ghost rest but he remembered the words she had spoken. They were to prove true, and all too soon. In June of that year, heat descended on the British Isles. Day after day the sun blazed unrelentingly down on the parched fields and pastures. The Thames River was sluggish and low, and its stench drifted throughout London, a city cloaked in a dull, yellow haze.<\/p>\n Then, the plague maiden and her kind struck. All over the city, blood red crosses appeared on the doors of the houses of the victims, with the pitiful inscription, “Lord have mercy upon us,” scribbled beneath. All over the city, bloated and blackened bodies lay unclaimed in the narrow streets. There was no one left to bury them except the drivers of death carts; they gathered up the corpses and dumped them into plague pits – mass graves dug on the outskirts of London.<\/p>\n During the summer, the disease spread into the countryside, decimating towns and villages alike. It ranged unchecked until the winter cold killed the fleas that harbored the bacillus. By that time, seventy-five thousand people had died. Then the plague abated, having made its last horrific flourish in England. There would be smaller epidemics, but none to match the nightmare of 1665.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/4efe94bc-2d3b-52b0-bb23-fcaefb3c27c0.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nRuins of Hinckley after the fire<\/em><\/p>\n
\n187. Olson, _______ Age 1, son of Otto Olson; found in the river.
\n188. Olson , _______Age 9, daughter of Otto Olson.
\n189. Olson, ______ Age 4, son of Otto Olson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nLegend Du Jour!<\/h3>\n
<\/a>
\nA miser thought to keep his gold
\nAs shield against the coming cold.
\nBut what cared Death for mortal gains?
\nHe smiled upon the miser’s pains.<\/em><\/p>\n