Damn the Old Tinderbox!

We're in the process of updating our website! Learn more about what that means and how you can help create history..

Milwaukee’s Palace of the West and the Fire that Defined an Era

Matthew J. Prigge

Explore the tragedy and intrigue behind one of history’s most devastating and mysterious fires.

304 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, 41 b&w photos
Paperback: $19.95 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-881-2
Ebook: $15.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-882-9
Publication Date: 3/18/2019

BUY

-

Description

In the dead of an unassuming January night in 1883, Milwaukee’s Newhall House hotel was set on fire. Two hours later, the building—once among the tallest in the nation—lay in ruins, and more than seventy people were dead. It was a tragedy that brought global notice to Milwaukee, with daring escapes, rescues, and heart-wrenching tales of victims who died from the fire or jumped to their deaths trying to escape the burning building. From the great horror emerged an even greater string of mysteries: Who had set the fire and who was to blame for the staggering loss of life? The Newhall’s hard-luck barkeeper? A gentleman arsonist? What of the many other unexplained fires at the hotel? Had the Newhall’s management neglected fire safety to boost their profits?

In Damn the Old Tinderbox!, author and historian Matthew Prigge explores the gripping tale of one of the Gilded Age’s forgotten calamities, a fire that remains among the deadliest unsolved arsons in American history, and a significant chapter in the history of Milwaukee and the Midwest.

Author Bio

Matthew J. Prigge

Matthew J. Prigge is a freelance author and historian from Milwaukee. His work has been featured in both local and national publications and has won multiple awards. He also previously hosted the local history radio segment, "What Made Milwaukee Famous," and has led sightseeing historical boat tours of the city’s rivers and harbor. He is the author of Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City’s First Century, also published by WHS Press. Prigge lives in the Milwaukee suburb of St. Francis.

In Matt Prigge’s telling, those who were startled from slumber as the killing fire raced through Newhall House ‘felt as if they had woken up dead in the middle of Hell come to Earth.’ And it had that night. ‘Damn the Old Tinderbox!’ brings to life the awful events in such vivid, grisly detail that readers will smell the choking smoke, flinch from the heat of the flames, and suffer the anguished wailing of the desperate and dying. A terrible tragedy, terrifically told.