Three Hundred Twenty-Two Men: The Ohio Penitentiary Fire

The Ohio Penitentiary had been designed to hold fifteen hundred inmates. By the spring of nineteen thirty it held forty-three hundred.

On the evening of April twenty-first, nineteen thirty, a fire broke out on the roof of the West Block. The roof was where roofing materials, oily rags, and construction debris had been stored. The blaze dropped burning material into the cell tiers below. Within minutes the upper galleries were filling with smoke and flame. Eight hundred men were already locked in their cells for the night.

The guards did not unlock the cells.

Their reasoning was not malice, exactly. A massive prison break was the fear. The West Block housed eight hundred men behind bars, and opening those doors in a fire meant opening them to the darkness and the chaos outside the walls too. The guards held their posts. The roof caved in on the upper tiers. At least a hundred sixty men in the cells directly beneath it were killed almost immediately. Three hundred twenty-two men died in total before morning.

Prison officials initially claimed that inmates had set the fire intentionally during an escape attempt. An investigation followed. Whether the fire was accidental or set, one fact was not in dispute: the prison was three times over capacity, dangerously maintained, and inadequately staffed. Those conditions were the result of decisions made by people who were not in the building on April twenty-first.

The Ohio Pen, as Columbusites called it, stood on the land now occupied by the Arena District north of downtown. It operated for a hundred and fifty years in total and was demolished in nineteen ninety-seven. The site where those men died is now restaurants and parking garages.

The prison records list their names. Most Ohioans do not know them.