Eliza Berry Johnson

A native of England, Eliza Berry married James G Johnson on April 20, 1868 in Knox County, Illinois. They had one son, William H, and three daughters, Ella (married Spindler), Lillian (married Frady) and Jennie (married Rife).

Eliza attended the theater with her three daughters and two grandsons, all who perished in the fire.  She was one of about fifty people who escaped from the Iroquois Theater fire by crawling on a plank sixty feet off the ground, and of only a dozen who survived after doing so. She crossed from a third-floor fire escape landing at the Iroquois to a window at Northwestern University on a plank stretched across Couch Place alley.

Leaning to either side meant certain death.  If Eliza Johnson had known three of her daughters and two of her grandchildren were dead, would she have kept going?  As it was, the fifty-five-year-old likely hoped some or all of her loved ones would survive.  She kept moving, carefully placing her hands, knees and feet to adjust the weight of her body and maintain her balance on the narrow plank, not daring to look down.  It would be weeks before she learned what she'd lost.

Eliza's burns kept her at St. Luke's hospital for weeks while family and physicians concealed that most of her children and half her grandchildren had died at the theater. Only later would she learn that her sons-in-law searched for three days before finding the bodies of her three daughters and two grandsons at four different morgues. She was still in the hospital when five hearses met the train that carried the five bodies to Lowell, Indiana, and when nearly six hundred guests attended the funeral by pastor Descom D. Hoagland.  Coincidentally, almost the same number as the number of fatalities from the fire.

"Mrs. Johnson was saved by crawling across to the Northwestern University building on a ladder. She is in St. Luke's Hospital, badly burned and scalded, but on the road to recovery. She has not been informed of the death of her children and grandchildren and it is feared that the shock would be too much for her." (Paxton Daily Record)

"Mrs. J.G. Johnson, the mother was found at St. Luke's hospital badly injured, but will probably recover. Mrs. Johnson was one of those who crawled across a ladder laid by some painters from the burning theatre to the North-Western University building and thus saved her life. She declares she does not know how she ever did it, but she reached the other side safely, terribly burned and scalded. She had not, however, been informed of the death of her daughters and grandchildren." Lowell (IN) Public Library, History Pages