The Lafayette Hotel of Aberdeen, Washington, occupied a quarter of a city block, with its entrance on H and Market Street. Shops and offices filled the ground floor, and a staircase led from the lobby to the second floor, where long-term residents rented small apartments. Other rooms were available for nightly rental.

Most of the long-term residents were retired men and women living on their pensions. In the summer of 1949, one of the apartments was occupied by two sister missionaries, June Speakman and Josephine Perkins, both of Salt Lake City. Some of the Lafayette’s tenants lived in “outside” apartments – their rooms had windows facing the streets or back side of the building; others, including the room of the Mormon missionaries, were cheaper “inside” apartments – their rooms had windows opening on a four-foot-square air shaft, with the windows of three other inside apartments almost within handshaking distance. Both “inside” and “outside” apartments had doors opening on the hotel’s interior hallway.

On July 3, 1949, 32 people made their homes in the Lafayette. July 3 was a Sunday, a busy day for the sister missionaries who, as usual, fell sound asleep as soon as they went to bed. “Out here in the field when we go to sleep at night, we practically die, we are so tired. Nothing wakes us, and we hardly stir all night,” June Speakman once wrote to her parents. It was probably a quiet night for all the hotel’s occupants, although out on the street, the foot traffic included soldiers on holiday leave who had no intention of spending their free time sleeping.

Just before 4:00 on the morning of Monday, July 4, a fire broke out near the stairs in the ground-floor lobby. Firefighters never determined its cause – and if proprietor Paul Myhr in his room behind the lobby ever saw the fire or knew how it started, he couldn’t tell investigators. He didn’t survive the night.

The fire burned hot and fast, creating smoke that filled the stairway and the hallway on the second floor. It crackled, spreading and increasing in intensity before alarming any of the hotel’s tenants.

Despite her habitual sound slumber, June Speakman suddenly sat up in bed – “not half awake,” she said, “but wide awake! I could hear a faint crackling and rumbling. My first thought was a rain storm. Then I realized that we were on the inside, that none of our windows were exposed to the outside, and that we had never heard rain before no matter how bad a storm it had been.

“I jumped out of bed and tried to find the light. Sister Perkins woke right up and asked me what was the matter. I said I didn’t know, and headed for the door. We both sensed something was dreadfully wrong. As soon as I opened the door, the terrific heat hit me in the face and smoke poured in. We knew the hall, our only avenue of escape, was on fire.”

Elsewhere in the building, other residents were beginning to waken to the same awful situation. Some were confused – resident Anson Greeley stuffed his money into the pockets of his trousers, then put on a different pair of trousers to escape the building, leaving his money, glasses, and false teeth behind. Eliza Beshers, crawling on her hands and knees through the smoke-filled hallway with two friends, suddenly remembered her purse left in her room and turned back, while her companions crept on. They survived; Mrs. Beshers did not. Fire investigators later found her purse, containing at least $3,000 in blackened currency.

The driver of a passing taxicab was the first outside the building to realize the disaster in the making. He radioed his dispatcher, who called the fire department, who broadcast the alarm over police and fire frequencies. Two police patrolmen who had passed the hotel only five minutes before without noticing anything amiss, heard the broadcast and were first police or fire officers to arrive at the scene. They found the hotel’s roof “glowing red,” and found the hotel’s elderly residents perched on second-floor windowsills. The only ladder they could find fell four feet short of those windows, but the officers helped three women to escape. One of them, 80-year-old Mary Roberts, jumped from her window into Officer Shea’s arms, nearly catapulting both of them to the pavement. Mrs. Roberts, already badly burned, was hospitalized; she died from her injuries almost three weeks later.

The two patrolmen, soon joined by the fire department, were not the only rescuers that night. Several of those off-duty soldiers called to people perched on windowsills that the fire department was on its way. Some tried to enter the building. One, 18-year-old Pfc. Gerald Ramey of Olympia, Washington, was particularly heroic: He made seven trips into the burning building, each time emerging with an elderly resident carried on his back, before he collapsed from smoke inhalation and was hospitalized.

Other residents found ways to rescue themselves. Anson Greeley, the man who wore the wrong trousers to escape, climbed out his window where he was able to make his way along a ledge to the roof of the next building. There he broke through the skylight of a beauty shop, dropped 15 feet to its floor, and made his way to the street.

And our lady missionaries? Sisters Speakman and Perkins credited their escape to a series of lucky accidents – or miracles. When the heat and smoke of the hallway drove them back into their room, they turned to the only other possible exit, that four-foot square air shaft, nothing more than a chimney-like space open from ground to roof.

“Just alongside our window,” Sister Speakman wrote to her parents, “was a ladder. It led up to the roof. It had been left there by some roof repairmen. We practically shot up that ladder.”

When they climbed out onto the roof, they found it in flames. Near the front edge of the building, they looked out over the street. Some of the soldiers on the street called to them not to jump, that help was on the way. “We had no intentions of jumping, even though the smoke was so thick we could hardly see the street.”

They were soon joined on the roof by another tenant, a man, who, in response to their request, went to see if any of the surrounding buildings came close enough to the Lafayette Hotel for them to reach – they might still be stranded, but at least the roof of another building would be at less risk of collapsing into an inferno below.

“He hurried off through the smoke to see. Then he called, ‘Girls! Girls!’ And we went running off into the smoke after him. There was another building attached, so we climbed over the little wall, then hurried on down to the next building. It was attached, so we climbed over on it. We no sooner got onto it than we turned for no reason at all to our right, instead of going on to the next building. We went as far as we could to our right, to the side edge of the building.

“And right there in front of us was a thin, shaky ladder that had been mistakenly left by the painters. We climbed down to the roof of the small building, and at the edge of the roof there was another ladder which led down to the ground.”

The sisters escaped none too soon – as she stepped onto the ground, Sister Speakman realized that her shoe was on fire. “We put it out and hurried out to the front of the hotel. Big crowds were gathered in front. Burned people were lying screaming on the walks; people had jumped, others were still in the building shrieking for help.”

In the end, Sisters Speakman and Perkins were the only residents of the hotel with inside apartments who survived. Seven of their neighbors died that night, with an 8th passing away later that month. “Everyone but us with inside apartments was burned to death.”

Photographs: June Speakman (left), Josephine Perkins (right); rescuing residents during the fire; checking hotspots and investigating after daylight.