Adella Wotherspoon, the last survivor of the deadliest disaster in New York City history until Sept. 11, 2001 — the burning and sinking of the steamboat General Slocum in June 1904 — died on Jan. 26. She was 100, the youngest Slocum survivor having at last become the oldest. The burning of the General Slocum, named for Maj. Gen. Henry Warner Slocum, a Civil War hero and New York congressman, was the most lethal peacetime maritime disaster in the nation’s history. It is generally accepted that 1,021 people died, almost seven times as many as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, which killed 146 and is often thought of as New York’s worst inferno.
The General Slocum, which killed members of a German Lutheran church excursion, also quickly receded in memory because of the start of World War I and the resultant anti-German feeling, wrote Edward T. O’Donnell [a friend of the SDMB] in his book, “Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum” (Broadway Books, 2003). Mrs. Wotherspoon herself used the example of the Titanic’s sinking in 1912, with about 1,500 deaths, to make another point. “The Titanic had a great many famous people on it,” she said. “This was just a family picnic.” On June 15, 1904, a sunny Wednesday morning, Mrs. Wotherspoon, then the 6-month-old called Adele Liebenow, was part of the 17th annual Sunday school picnic of St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, on the heavily German Lower East Side. The church had chartered a paddle-wheel, 264-foot-long steamboat, for $350 from the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company to go to Locust Grove Picnic Ground at Eaton’s Neck on Long Island. The Liebenow party included Adele’s parents, her two sisters, three aunts, an uncle and two cousins.
Forty minutes later, the joy turned to abject terror. Smoke started billowing from a forward storage room. A spark, most likely from a carelessly tossed match, had ignited some straw. Soon, the boat was an inferno. The captain ignored cries to steam for shore and proceeded at top speed through the perilous waters known as Hell Gate to North Brother Island, a mile ahead. The inexperienced crew, which had not had a single fire drill, provided scant help. Lifeboats were wired or glued to the deck with layers of paint, cork in the life jackets had turned to dust with age and fire hoses broke under water pressure. By the time the General Slocum reached the island, it was too late. The death toll among the estimated 1,331 passengers was 1,021, according to most sources. The dead included Adele’s sisters, Anna, 3, and Helen, 6. Munsey’s Magazine, a periodical of the time, wrote, “Children whom the flames had caught on the forward decks rushed, blazing like torches to their mothers.”
Adele was nearby in the arms of her mother, also named Anna, when the fire started. Her father, Paul, was elsewhere on the boat. Her mother covered her face, and, with her clothing on fire, jumped into the river. “My mother was very, very badly burned, all up her left side,” Mrs. Wotherspoon said in an interview with The Journal News of Westchester County in 1999, “so I assumed that she hung on as long as she could and then dropped into the water when she couldn’t hang on anymore.” After helping the two to shore, Mr. Liebenow left to search for his missing daughters. The body of Helen was never found, but he identified little Anna’s. By then, he had lost track of his wife and baby. Mr. Liebenow was himself badly burned on the head but relentlessly prowled the city’s hospital corridors in search of his missing family members. Each hospital tried to detain him, but he refused. The New York Times reported that he was so “crazed with grief and pain” that he almost became violent with the coroner who was trying to help him in his quest. Finally, he found the lost ones.
In 2002, Catherine Connelly, a Slocum survivor, died at 109, leaving only Mrs. Wotherspoon. “I’m sorry, of course,” Mrs. Wotherspoon said then in an interview with The Times. “She had a long life. She was a very interesting person.” So was Mrs. Wotherspoon. Frank Duffy, vice president of the Maritime Industry Museum of the State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx and a friend of Mrs. Wotherspoon for 25 years, said that the organizers of the 100th annual Slocum commemoration had hoped she could attend the event, planned for June 12 and 13, which is to include a wreath-laying off North Brother Island.