Original Air Date: 4/3/2019
On January 10th, 1883, the famed Newhall House hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, caught fire. Made worse by a series of blunders by hotel staff and a poorly trained and equipped fire department, seventy five people would ultimately lose their lives in the horrific, raging inferno.
My guest, historian Matthew J. Prigge, is author of “Damn the Old Tinderbox! Milwaukee’s Palace of the West and the Fire That Defined An Era”. He tells the harrowing stories of the guests and the staff who both perished and escaped from one of the most devastating hotel fires in American history, and the man who would eventually be arrested and tried for setting the blaze.
More about the author: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS15238
