The Denbigh Fire of 1902:
A Bit of Bryn Mawr History captured in the College Archives
By Lorett Treese

On the night of Sunday, March 16th, 1902, a Bryn Mawr student left her room in Denbigh Hall shortly before eleven o'clock. While she was gone, a gust of wind blew the screen from her window, knocking over her oil lamp. Fire quickly spread from her bed to the walls, through the ceiling, and into the attic. Several other students helped her try to douse the flames, but in the end there was nothing to do but evacuate the building as the fire spread from the east wing to the main hall.

Bryn Mawr students gathered outside and battled the flames with the college's firefighting equipment while a summons for help brought volunteer fire companies from the villages of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Ardmore. Telephone wires downed by a recent storm prevented president M. Carey Thomas from reaching Philadelphia until she got local operators to use a new underground system. Although they were delayed by the muddy condition of the roads, firefighters arrived from Philadelphia to aid the effort to save the dorm.

M. Carey Thomas saved a newspaper story about the fire published the following day, tucking it into the many files that have since become the collection known as the Papers of M. Carey Thomas, housed in the College Archives at Bryn Mawr College. The story praises both Thomas and the Mawrters, calling the students "brave and fearless girls" and quoting from the speech Thomas gave the next morning in the college's chapel where she called upon the college community to "go on with our exercises, so that our minds should be occupied." It also included a photograph of the ghostly walls of Denbigh that had remained standing around a gutted interior.

Fortunately the building was fully insured. A report of the building committee, also housed in the College Archives, indicates that within about a month, the college had solicited several bids for reconstruction. M. Carey Thomas's incoming correspondence includes the many letters that she received immediately after the fire from prominent figures in the academic world and leading businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Some were letters of condolence, but Rockefeller congratulated Thomas upon her "escape from financial embarrassment because of the fire" and mentioned that he was "delighted to hear that the "entire loss [was] covered by insurance."

The senior John D. Rockefeller had already promised Miss Thomas a new dorm and a central heating and lighting plant provided the college could match his $250,000 in donations for a new library. After the fire, telegrams were sent to all alumnae to spur their fundraising efforts. Since there were only 435 alumnae at the time, a newspaper account in the papers of M. Carey Thomas reported that the women (many of whom were employed as teachers) had been "obliged to turn to the wealthy friends of education throughout the country in this emergency." Other contributions soon started coming in from faculty, other students, and residents of the Philadelphia area for the "Undergraduate Denbigh Relief Fund" to compensate the individual girls who had lost all their clothes and personal possessions.

The collection of student publications in the Bryn Mawr College Archives reveal how students managed to cope with the tragedy. The April 11th issue of a biweekly magazine called The Fortnightly Philistine carried an editorial that stated, "Indeed for a while afterward our world seemed so shoved awry, as with Archimedes' lever, that we felt it could never quite recover its balance." The editorial went on to explain that "Even the loss of Denbigh was not sufficient to destroy our equilibrium. With the first hints of green and spring sunshine, we are back again pursuing our accustomed and studious course."

Writing for one of the yearbooks now housed in the College Archives, Esther Lowenthal of the class of 1905 placed the disaster in perspective after the dorm had been rebuilt and the rest of the building program accomplished. She wrote, "It stands our as a land-mark in the material progress of the College. For since the Denbigh fire, the lambent glow of the students' lamps has been replaced by the brilliant sparkle of electricity; the sociable purr of the teakettle has been banished to the pantry, and the consumption of wood alcohol has fallen off in the land. It is owing to the Denbigh fire that we have our well-hidden power house, and the attendant battalion of thermostats. And it directly owing to this same cause that we, of the Class of 1905, have seen Rockefeller and the Library come into being."

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