Central Bridge barbershop fire claimed seven lives
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 04-23-16
An early morning blaze in a building housing living quarters and a Central Bridge barber shop claimed the lives of seven members of the Teale family on Wednesday, February 17, 1926.
The minister of the Central Bridge Methodist Church, Reverend Harrison Black, thought he noticed smoke in the distance when he got off the midnight train from Albany and rushed to the scene.
Reverend Black found barber shop owner Edward Malbourn Teale trying to get his children out of the building. The Teales lived over the barber shop. Black and Edward were able to save Catherine, the oldest child, but not the children trapped in a second floor bedroom and an attic room.
Edward’s 29-year old wife Elizabeth also was attempting to save her children. The men tried to restrain her but she displayed enormous strength and freed herself twice from their grasp. Edward grabbed his wife’s hair in his last effort to pull her from the fire but she broke free.
“She finally disappeared into the flames, perishing with her children,” said Tara Hime Norman, The story of the lost Teale family came to Norman’s attention in a scrap book kept by her aunt. Norman then consulted online newspaper archives for more on the story as part of her research on her family’s ancestry. The Teale children who died in the fire were Norman’s third cousins.
Norman said, “Both men had experienced burns and realized that the only escape route left to them was a bay window that protruded from the second floor. They jumped.”
Black was not hurt in the fall, but Edward broke a leg and an arm and badly hurt his other arm.
Norman said, “Edward’s father’s home was next door to the barber shop but far enough removed to escape damage.”
Edward was transported to an Albany hospital. His daughter Catherine was taken in by friends. The cause of the fire was a faulty oil stove.
The children who died in the fire were Charles, eleven; David, seven; Ernest, four; Sidney, three; Elizabeth, two and an unnamed infant daughter.
Norman said, “Edward’s parents, Ursula and Malbourn “Mal” Teale, from whom he had purchased the barber business, returned immediately from Florida where they had been wintering. They ordered two coffins: one for their daughter-in-law and the two youngest children and another for the remaining four little charred bodies.”
Norman said Edward was not able to attend the funeral because of his injuries, “The day of the funeral the local school and businesses were closed. A collection of some seven hundred dollars taken up for the family was declined by Mal and Ursula who asked that it instead be given to the family of a local victim of a sawmill accident.”
Norman said Edward and his daughter Catherine went with his parents to Florida to recuperate, “Edward eventually married Bertha Keyes Bouton and had three more children: Edward, Raymond and Dawn. The family also included two of Bertha’s daughters from a prior marriage.
“While Edward lived another 30 years, Catherine died in a sanatorium barely a decade after the fire, most likely tuberculosis.” She had been studying to become a teacher.
Norman remembers visiting Mal Teale in Central Bridge but said she “was too young to recall anyone discussing the fire.”
When Mal Teale died in 1950, Norman said she was about the age of Ernest Teale when he perished in the 1926 fire and half the age of Charles Teale, who also died in the blaze and had been “the town’s favorite newsboy.”
Norman grew up in Fonda and Fultonville and lives today in Naples, Florida.
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