Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Jeweler, a Woman Diver, a Candy Butcher: Eastland’s Unlikely Trio

• Natalie Zett

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The untold stories of the 1915 Eastland disaster continue to surface over a century later through forgotten newspaper accounts and overlooked connections. These rediscovered narratives reveal how this Chicago tragedy touched lives across America in ways rarely documented.

FEATURED STORIES

  • H.L. Bening, a West Virginia jeweler who witnessed the disaster while in Chicago on business, providing a powerful emotional account
  • • The "candy butchers" who sold refreshments aboard the Eastland and survived to share their stories of the capsizing and rescue efforts 
  • • "Little Elsie," a professional high diver who believed her brother died in the disaster, though research suggests this may have been mistaken

What I Learned

  • The forgotten profession of "candy butchers" - traveling vendors who sold treats, souvenirs and newspapers on trains, in theaters, and aboard excursion boats
  • How the golden age of women high divers represented women defying both gravity and societal expectations in the early 1900s
  • Why these rediscovered accounts matter in understanding how history ripples outward beyond headlines

Resources

Newspaper Citations

  • Washington Herald, August 8, 1915.
  • Beckley Messenger (Beckley, West Virginia), August 3, 1915.
  • Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 25, 1915.
  • The Day Book (Chicago), August 14, 1915.


Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well, and we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 115 of Flower in the River, and I hope you're doing well. So I've shared that throughout this research project, aka podcast, that I have accumulated quite a treasure trove of stories in the last couple of years that I've been doing this. Most of these biographies have never been shared, and there's also a good number of people that I've discovered who were indeed connected to the Eastland disaster, who are not even mentioned in any of the websites or in any of the literature about the Eastland. So I've been trying to deal with that as well, and my North Star, or maybe through line, for doing the history of these people of the Eastland is this If the Eastland is mentioned somewhere in a story about one of these people or a community, my job is to see it through and not to dismiss it. Take it as far as I can, because you never know what else will be revealed when a story is shared. And that's why I often say that this is as much a research project as it is a podcast, because going into this I don't know everything. I literally do not know each week what I might be talking about, because the research will take me down some interesting paths. If you've listened to this podcast, you know what I'm talking about, right? So today I have three people, three lives that intersected with this tragedy in ways that no one could have predicted. I have a jeweler from West Virginia who was in Chicago on business and who happened to just be blocks away when the unthinkable occurred. Next, a professional high diver who abandoned her Washington DC show and raced to Chicago, convinced that her brother was among the dead. And a couple of men who were selling refreshments aboard the Eastland who lived to tell about it. Their stories were captured by reporters in those first chaotic days after the disaster. They were printed in newspapers from West Virginia to DC, to Chicago, and then filed away, lost to time. But years later they were digitized and they are now available to anybody bothering to type in Eastland disaster into any search bar. They remind us that history ripples outward in ways that we rarely think to document or to pay attention to.

Natalie Zett:

Today I want to begin with the story of someone called H L Benning, b-e-n-i-n-g, who was a jeweler whose eyewitness account of the Eastland disaster was published in a small West Virginia newspaper and then largely forgotten for over a century. Let me start by reading Benning's account as it appeared in the Beckley Messenger on Tuesday August 3rd 1915, so the Eastland occurred on July 24th, so this is just a few days after the disaster. Quote H L Benning, the Graham jeweler, was an eyewitness to the scenes, attending the capsizing of the excursion boat Eastland at Chicago river when the accident happened, and he hurried to the scene and watched the work of the rescue and saw the hundreds of men, women and children go to their deaths in the water. He says the people gathered on the riverbanks were so awe-stricken that hardly a sound was uttered by anyone. Mr Benning says the catastrophe made him sick and he did not feel like eating for several days. The sight of that mass of humanity pinned in the water, he says, cannot be appreciated by those who only learned of it through the newspapers. Mr Benning states that one husband and wife who were rescued from the water were drawn up right by his side. The woman looked at her husband, remarked in a low tone of voice didn't it happen so quickly? Saying I am sick. And then she fainted but was revived. The police, who gathered in great numbers, found great difficulty in protecting the ship's captain from the angry mob. He states that the blame rests with the inspector chiefly and the engineer for the failure of the latter to see that the Eastland was properly ballasted. And at the end it says Graham was corrected to Bluefield Telegraph. So that was another location in West Virginia.

Natalie Zett:

It's a short article but there's a lot in it. What strikes me about Benning's account is how he captures not just what he saw but the emotional impact. He talks about the silence of the shocked onlookers. Now I would think that if people had witnessed something this horrendous they would be screaming, but at least for those moments they were not. And he talks about his own inability to eat for days afterward and the quiet words of the survivors pulled from the river beside him. He was witness to that, he remembered that and he shared that with this reporter. Those intimate details paint a vivid picture and another aspect of the human experience of this disaster that often gets lost in the statistics and the sensationalism and the technical explanations that help keep us at an emotional distance.

Natalie Zett:

But who was HL Benning, why was he in Chicago that day and what happened to him after this tragedy? Harris L Benning that was his name was born on April 8th 1885. At the time of the disaster he was a jeweler and optician living in Bluefield, west Virginia. I discovered that he was listed in the 1915 Bluefield City Directory where his business was located in the first National Bank building. Now his father, august Heinrich Dietrich Benning, was a German immigrant who became, according to his 1933 obituary quote, one of the pioneer businessmen of Roanoke they're talking about Virginia, by the way. The family had deep roots there and Harris would eventually follow in his father's entrepreneurial footsteps.

Natalie Zett:

But why was HL Benning in Chicago in July 1915? We don't know, but as a jeweler he might have been there on business, perhaps purchasing supplies or attending a trade event, and he was one of the many who rushed to the scene, joining thousands of horrified spectators. But fortunately, benning's account was preserved in that small town newspaper, giving us a window into those chaotic moments and I really enjoy finding these small town or community newspapers. They give one more aspect of what this disaster was through a different lens. I mean, he was an optician and he was also a jeweler, so I suspect that he looked at the world and looked at events very closely and noticed details that many of us would not notice unless we did that sort of work. I'm sure that he carried that memory with him to the end of his life and he lived for decades after witnessing the Eastland disaster and according to his death certificate and obituary, he owned a jewelry shop and was active in the community as a member of the Elks Lodge. He died on July 24th 1959, exactly 45 years to the day after the Eastland disaster, and he was 74 years old. He was survived by his wife, his daughter, two sisters and three grandchildren. So he probably has descendants and his funeral was held at the Christ Lutheran Church and he was buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Roanoke.

Natalie Zett:

I want to pause and say that many descendants or relatives of these people who experienced the Eastland disaster they might not even know of their person's connection to it. What has happened to me now just a few times is that people who were just randomly searching for mention of their ancestor online. They come across my podcast or website and, lo and behold, they find out they have a connection to the Eastland disaster, something that they may not have even heard of. Not have even heard of. So even though, if you build it, they will come, might work sometimes, if someone doesn't even know there's a connection to begin with, how would they know to look for it? I'm going to go on to the next story, and this is from the Richmond Times Dispatch, sunday, july 25, 1915. Headline Candy Butcher Tells of Accident. Tells of accident.

Natalie Zett:

Ld Gattery, employed as a candy butcher on the steamer, was the first eyewitness to tell a detailed story of the accident. It was about 7.40 o'clock this morning and the boat was lying at the dock near Clark Street, bloating with passengers, said Gattery we were to leave in 20 minutes and the upper deck and cabins were crowded with passengers. There were hundreds of women and children. I estimate that there were between 2,000 and 3,000 on the boat at the time of the accident. I was standing on the lower deck near the gangplank watching the people come aboard.

Natalie Zett:

Suddenly I noticed the boat list toward the center of the river. It rolled slightly at first and then seemed to stop. Then it started to roll again and I shouted to the crowd to keep still. Apparently, a majority of the passengers were on one side of the boat and this had overweighted it and caused it to list. The housers which held the boat to the dock snapped and the officers pulled the gangplank in and refused to allow any more on the boat. At this time everybody was panic-stricken. Women screamed and men tried to quiet them. I ran back to the port side where the gangway had been. The boat then slowly drifted away from the dock, rolling as it slipped into the midstream, and a moment later it had turned over on its side. I climbed over on the side of the boat and stayed there until I was taken off by lifesavers. Many of the passengers leaped into the water and the boat went over. Scores of others were caught in the cabins and drowned. When the small boats began coming out to us, I worked with other survivors in taking passengers out of the water and cutting holes in the cabins to remove bodies. We've got a lot going on here.

Natalie Zett:

Ld Gattery, whose name I've only seen listed twice in newspaper accounts as well as on a list of Eastland survivors. I could not locate him on Ancestry or FamilySearch so his history is going to be a little more difficult to locate, but I have the feeling that somebody might know who this is. But nonetheless he was working on the Eastland but then he became a witness and then he became a rescuer, so he served multiple roles during that day and this is a powerful, obviously tragic piece of historical detail highlighting the immediate aftermath of the Eastland disaster. From somebody who was on it felt what was happening and it probably went by, maybe slowly for him or maybe very quickly. People have reported that when they experience traumatic events, sometimes time slows down and it seems like it's going in slow motion. At other times it goes so quickly that they don't even have time to think. Regardless of how somebody experiences, it brings to life the desperate scene through the eyes of those present.

Natalie Zett:

Now I'm going to read another account by somebody else who was also a quote-unquote candy butcher. This is from the Day Book from August 25th 1915. And I'm reading in the middle of an article because I just want to make mention of this. So the article involves big discussion about what happened on the Eastland, who to blame this sort of thing? And then we have this paragraph, paragraph State's Attorney Hoyne and federal officials are scouring the Middle West for a man named Wolf that's W-O-L-F-E. Eastland Candy Butcher who suddenly disappeared after he is said to have made serious charges concerning the handling of the boat. He is said to know some interesting things about what took place on board the Eastland the night before the tragedy. Wolfe was saved. His wife drowned, oh dear. So I did not find anyone with the surname of Wolf that matches this description, who died on the Eastland.

Natalie Zett:

I'm sorry that this detailed history hasn't been explored earlier, because had it been explored, say, even 25 years ago, there might have been people alive who would have remembered what had happened. But so much time has gone by that this might not be the case. Happened, but so much time has gone by that this might not be the case. Let's see. So we've got several possibilities here. The most obvious one is that these are indeed two separate people who were working as candy butchers that day. The other possibility is that this is the same person who was either going by a different name or for whom the journalists reported the incorrect name. So maybe there's another possibility, but without further information this is going to be a difficult one to research, but not impossible. We had to add a little levity.

Natalie Zett:

Okay, you're probably wondering what is a candy butcher? Have you ever heard that term before? I never did. Here's what I've been able to ascertain from a really quick sweep of historical records here. So a candy butcher was a kind of traveling vendor. They were the folks weaving up and down train aisles calling out from the stands at baseball games. You've seen these people hustling through circus tents with trays of candy, peanuts, popcorn, soda and sometimes even newspapers or cheap souvenirs. If you were bored, hungry or needed something to read, they had you covered. And this title showed up around the 1860s. Candy obviously stood for treats and butcher. I don't think of candy and butcher together, but that came from their bold, sometimes very aggressive sales style, according to one report anyway. So think more meat market energy than mall kiosk.

Natalie Zett:

Okay, these people were performers as much as sellers, using sing-song calls, fast talk and showmanship to grab your attention over the roar of the train or the boat or the crowd. There was no formal training. You just learned by doing, or probably by watching, other people. Maybe this profession ran in families. What I also learned is that many of these people started out selling papers as news butchers. Then they graduated to the full snack arsenal and others jumped in because it offered freedom, travel or a way to make cash without being stuck in a factory or shop and a place like Chicago. Back in the early 20th century these people were probably everywhere Rail stations, parks, waterfront, especially those crowded excursion boats like the Eastland. They were ideal territory. Candy butchers were often independent contractors who paid for the right to sell on board. They carried heavy trays, kept track of their own inventory and cash and had to be ready for anything, including, unfortunately, disaster. This was tough, transient work but for the right person with the right personality, with the stamina and hustle, this could be a pretty sweet gig. And for those two guys, or the one guy going by two identities aboard the Eastland, it was a job that placed them right in the path of catastrophe. And yet they or he lived to tell the tale.

Natalie Zett:

And we're going to continue. I'm going to lead off with an article, and this is from the Washington Herald, sunday, august 8th 1915. Headline Lady High Diver at Beach Little Elsie will be week's principal attraction at resort. The ladies' brass band, which will continue this week to give twice-daily concerts at Chesapeake Beach of popular airs interspersed with ever-welcome patriotic music, will be followed during the week commencing tomorrow by Little Elsie, premier lady high diver of the world. Little Elsie was originally expected to appear at the beach the week of July 25th but was grief-stricken on the eve of her departure to fulfill the engagement. Upon hearing that her brother had perished in the Eastland catastrophe at Chicago, she immediately left to identify the body. It will be with intermingled admiration and sympathy that the public will witness her hair-raising dives from over 100 feet in the air into only four feet of water. An act of this nature requires the greatest nerve under favorable conditions, and it is a wonderful demonstration of the willpower of this tiny girl to see her performing with her usual daring and abandon. Following her terrible shock, little Elsie has wired, however, that she will fulfill her contract and thus give Washingtonians an opportunity to see her before she leaves to join her family. That's the end of the article.

Natalie Zett:

Let's talk about little Elsie. This was my introduction to her and we have no last name, no backstory, just a mention. In a 1915 newspaper article from the Washington Herald, she was described as the premier lady high diver of the world and was scheduled to perform at Chesapeake Beach, but at the last minute she canceled her appearance because, according to the article, she had just received word that her brother had perished in the Eastland disaster. Okay, no last name given, just the stage name, little Elsie. Do you think I found out who she was? I did, but it took a lot of back and forth by searching in various newspapers with all kinds of search terms and combinations, and eventually I found another newspaper that gave me a small but crucial clue her husband's name, samuel Glover. And that was enough to begin tracing her story, to create her family tree. So let me introduce you to little Elsie.

Natalie Zett:

She turned out to be Elsie Herter H-U-R-T-E-R. Glover, born in Chicago in 1892. Her parents were Jacques Herter, a Swiss immigrant, and Hilda Johnson, from Sweden. Elsie had three siblings, wallace, raymond and Grace, all of whom lived long lives. According to the census records, I could find no record of any siblings of hers dying in 1915. And the siblings that would have been old enough to work, that would be Wallace and Raymond. At that point none of them were working for Western Electric, according to the Chicago directories and according to the census and just a quick note not everyone who was on the Eastland worked for Western Electric. For one thing, my own aunt who was a board and who died. She was not an employee, but there were family members, friends, children and others who somehow were able to get tickets for this event. So not appearing on a company list doesn't mean someone wasn't aboard, but in this case I still couldn't find a match. So my research shows that none of her brothers died on the Eastland Not one.

Natalie Zett:

So what was going on there? Why did Elsie believe her brother had died? There are a few possibilities. Again, don't forget this was a very chaotic time. A lot was going on. Possibilities Again, don't forget, this was a very chaotic time. A lot was going on. News, I have to say, traveled better than I would have ever thought it was able to in 1915. But there were a lot of errors, a lot of inaccuracies, a lot of mistaken identities, a lot of people that were assumed to be dead that were alive, a lot of people that were supposedly alive that were dead, things like this. So it was just a crazy time. But here are some possibilities. Maybe this was a case of mistaken identity and maybe someone thought they saw her brother's name, or maybe they couldn't reach him and feared the worst. Maybe that's what happened and it was also possible that it was a misunderstanding or a misquote. And we can't ignore the reality that Elsie was a performer In 1915, women in show business didn't have PR agents.

Natalie Zett:

They had newspaper columns and word of mouth and emotions sold tickets. So I'm not saying this is what they were doing, but we don't know either. We have to be open to all possibilities. We may never know unless some of her family members, her descendants, know the backstory. But as far as I can tell, she didn't lose a brother on the Eastland. And again, I also checked the records and there's nobody with the last name of Herder, or even close to that, who died on the Eastland.

Natalie Zett:

Let's rewind a little bit here. I want to read to you the results of some of the research that I did about women high divers. So we'll talk about the golden age of women high divers. Back in the early 1900s, way before media. As we know, it was a thing people got their thrills from live shows and one act that could stop a crowd in its tracks a woman diving from 100 feet up into a tank barely deeper than a bathtub, or at least it seemed to be that way the way it was reported.

Natalie Zett:

High diving women were everywhere. Vaudeville circuits loved them because they added drama and danger to otherwise lighthearted lineups. While comedians got chuckles, the high divers got gasps. Circuses adored them. They were like trapeze artists without the safety net. These dives weren't just physical feats, they were stunts wrapped in pageantry. And at fairs and amusement parks they were stars. Picture summer resorts, carnival crowds and a tiny figure launching off a platform, slicing through the sky like a comet before crashing into a tank. In 1915, elsie herself drew an estimated 75,000 people at a Cleveland carnival. That's not a typo.

Natalie Zett:

But it wasn't just the danger. First there was the thrill. Diving from those heights took precision, guts and a high pain threshold. There was nothing fake about this. Second, it was unexpected In an era where women were supposed to be dainty and domestic. Seeing one of them soar off a tower into a splash of water was shocking. It flipped expectations and demanded attention. These women weren't just diving, they were defying societal norms for that time.

Natalie Zett:

And then came the stories. Promoters knew how to play up a good story, like little Elsie's grief-stricken but brave performance after supposedly losing her brother. That was an emotional gut punch that made her dive even more compelling Stories like this blurred the lines between personal tragedy and public spectacle. That very well could have been what was going on, and again we'll see if there's more information to be found about this, but we still have to hold this up as a possibility, and I am not casting aspersions on little Elsie, because in fact we don't know what happened there. And here's a little more history for you. There was an evolution of women's diving, and now, while these high diving acts were making waves at fairs and circuses, another form of diving was gaining respect Competitive women's diving. By 1912, women's platform diving had made it to the Olympics in Stockholm. I even found footage for that and I'll share that with you in the show notes. This was the first time women competed in diving at the Games.

Natalie Zett:

As remarkable as this is, not all of these stories stay airborne forever, and the popularity of high diving acts began to wane, and fast. For one thing, cinema stole the spotlight. We had silent movies and eventually talkies, and that offered bigger thrills with less risk. And also, of course, safety regulations tightened, and for good reason. These acts were genuinely dangerous and costs ballooned. Setting up towers, tanks and touring logistics wasn't cheap. And how do you insure people for doing this type of thing. I don't know. I bet it became unaffordable. As is often the case, the novelty wears off. We are human and we get bored very quickly, right. Even back then, when something daring becomes routine, the crowds move on to something more daring. Yet for a time, these women ruled, and I want to mention them just because of that, because of their courage and even their ability to attract publicity. This was during a time where women were told that they couldn't do certain things, and they did them anyway. So bravo to little Elsie and all the other women who partook of this sport of diving.

Natalie Zett:

So here we are three stories, three very different lives, but all somehow touched by just a few minutes. On a Saturday morning on July 24th 1915 in Chicago, harris Benning, the jeweler from West Virginia, just happened to be in Chicago on business. He witnessed something so horrific it took away his appetite for days. Yet he found the words to describe the eerie silence of thousands of people too shocked to scream. His account survived in a small town newspaper, waiting over a century for someone to notice the candy butcher or butchers, whether it was LD Gattery, aka Wolf, or LD Gattery and somebody else called Wolf, they were just trying to make a living selling treats and newspapers on an excursion boat. Their job placed them right in the path of catastrophe. Yet they became rescuers, cutting holes in cabins to pull out bodies. Their stories scattered across different newspapers, then lost to time but later found. And little Elsie, the premier lady high diver of the world, who may or may not have lost a brother that day. Whether her grief was real or her publicity was carefully crafted, she represents something profound Women in 1915 who defied gravity and expectations, who soared through the air at 100 feet while society told them to stay grounded. These are professions that once were the candy butchers with their sing-song calls and heavy trays, the high divers who drew 75,000 people to watch them slice through the sky. The Eastland disaster wasn't just about people who died or those who survived. It was about every person who rushed to that riverbank, every reporter who interviewed a witness, every newspaper reader in West Virginia or Washington DC who learned that something unthinkable had happened in Chicago.

Natalie Zett:

History doesn't end when the headline fades. It keeps spreading, touching lives in ways we rarely think to document. These stories matter because they remind us that every tragedy is also thousands of smaller tragedies, thousands of lives changed in ways that are large and small, visible and invisible. That's why we don't accept it when someone says there's nothing more to find, because there's always another story, another voice, another way that history has touched a life and left its mark. The Eastland disaster happened over 100 years ago, but its stories still are surfacing each week here anyway, and still finding their way back to us through digitized newspapers and books and forgotten records. And as we keep looking and as we keep listening to these voices from the past, the ripples keep spreading. They keep talking to us.

Natalie Zett:

So I hope you enjoyed this adventure and until next time. This is Natalie. Have a great week, take care of yourselves and each other, and I'll be back. Hey, that's it for this episode and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes, and for more information, please go to my website, that's wwwflowerintherivercom. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover, because I still owe people money and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now.

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