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"Eyewitness at the Triangle"

Published in the Milwaukee Journal, March 27, 1911

"On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies."

On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, Milwaukee Journal reporter William G. Shepherd was walking near the corner of Washington and Greene Streets in lower Manhattan in New York City when he noticed smoke coming from a ten-story building. Reacting with a journalist's instincts, he came closer to watch.

Shepherd picked up a telephone and dictated his story to United Press, which provided news stories via telegraph to newspapers around the country that did not have their own reporters in distant cities.

What Shepherd saw was a fire at the Triangle Shirt-waist Company, which manufactured women's blouses. The company took up the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building. There, about five hundred women, most of them young...