By Conrad Easterday, CTCN Editor

A hundred years ago on Christmas Eve, 36 people died in the Babbs Switch schoolhouse near Hobart. It took less than nine minutes for the roof to fall in, dooming everyone left inside, including two of Bill Braun’s uncles.
Braun’s mother, 4-year-old Lilly Biggers, crawled to safety after being jostled from the arms of her mother who stayed inside the building looking for Lilly and her other children. She died with her two boys. Another daughter, Braun’s aunt, also escaped the fire.
Young Lilly outlived all of the survivors of the fire except for Joe Hebensperger. She passed away at 94 before Braun decided to write a 50-page booklet documenting the disaster.
The loss of life and its many causes changed how schools and other public buildings were designed and constructed in the years following the holiday fire.
Braun, the 30-year president of the Kiowa County Historical Society, said the Oklahoma Legislature’s Fawks bill addressed many of the deficiencies in the 24’ x 36’ building that contributed to the fire. Similar legislation was passed in other states.
The Fawks bill required all schools to have a minimum of two doors. (The Babbs Switch school originally had two doors, Braun said.) All school doors were required to open outward. Any window screens had to be removable from the inside, and schools had to keep fire extinguishers on the premises.
It seemed everything that might have gone wrong on that Christmas Eve did.
The building was crowded. Some sources put the number at more than 200. Braun would only say that there were more than 100 inside given the 36 deaths and the burns suffered by 65 survivors. Some in attendance, mostly men, went outside after the program was finished, even though the temperature was in the teens. Once the blaze started, they tried to help force the doors open. Lewis Edens was credited with saving many lives.
It began with the 16-year-old son of a school board member who was tasked with playing Santa Claus, Braun said. Dowell Bolding was handing out gifts from under the tree, which was lighted with candles. Removing one of the gifts shifted a candle enough to ignite the cedar tree, a species notorious for its flamability. He tried to put out the flames, and someone else threw a coat over the tree. Another knocked it over to make it easier to manage the flames. The fire only spread, and once they reached the turpentine on the walls, the flames flashed over the entire room.Found on his back, Bolding was identified by the portion of the unburned Santa suit beneath him.
Three couples engaged to be married attended the event. One couple died holding hands in the center of the room. Another couple escaped. The third couple were at the windows, holding hands through the screens over the windows intended to prevent hobos from breaking into the school from the nearby train tracks. Someone did get the corner of one screen loose and supposedly a boy escaped, although Braun could not verify the story.
The crush at the inward opening doors was worse on the right side, Braun said. Those trying to help found more success on the left.
People in nearby Hobart saw the fire’s glow and came out to help, arriving too late to save anyone but the already injured who were taken to one of two hospitals in town.
Twenty-six of the dead were interred in a community grave with headstones arranged in alphabetical order. The 10 who were positively identified were buried in family plots nearby.
A memorial stands at the site of the school.