The story of the Collinwood fire/school disaster - It was Ash Wednesday, March the fourth 1908, a typical winter day for the students of Lake view as they went to their classes which began at 8.45am. There were approximately 336 in the school. Emma Neibert, a fifth-grader, spotted smoke rising from a basement storage cupboard beneath the main stairway at 9:30 a.m. Fritz Hirter, the janitor, was immediately told, and he rang the fire bell and opened the front and back doors. Because the fire originated just beneath the main stairwell, the front escape was totally blocked by flames in a matter of minutes. When the students discovered the front escape was blocked, they all made a rush for the rear exit.