When was South Bend's deadliest residential fire? It looks like 1929.

Editor's note: Since the original publication of this story, Angel Smith died Friday morning, making her the sixth fatality from the Jan. 21 fire that also killed five of her siblings. It and the April 18, 1929, fire recounted below are now believed to be the deadliest residential fire in South Bend's history.

SOUTH BEND — In his 37 years with the South Bend Fire Department, Chief Carl Buchanon said Monday, the fire at 222 N. LaPorte Ave. on Sunday, Jan. 21 that killed five children was the deadliest he had seen.

Trapped on the second floor of their home, Demetis, 10; Davida, 9; Deontay, 5; D’Angelo, 4; and Faith Smith, 17 months, died in the fire. Their older sister, Angel, 11, survived and eventually was transported to Riley Children's Health in Indianapolis, where she has been listed in critical condition. Their father, David Smith, survived.

Although fires have destroyed numerous businesses, according to a history of the South Bend Fire Department posted to The History Museum's website, it appears that the city's deadliest residential fire happened more than 90 years ago. Another one soon after also had tragic consequences.

The Purucker family

The front page of the April 19, 1929, Tribune reported that about 10 p.m. April 18, 1929, the explosion of an oil lamp in a chicken incubator in the kitchen caused a fire that gutted the home of the Harvey Purucker family at 1214 S. 36th St.

The fire killed six people: Mr. and Mrs. Purucker’s four sons, Aloysius, John, Edmund and Louis; an orphaned cousin of the Purucker children who lived with the family, Catherine Gard; and Mrs. Purucker’s mother, Mary Goodley, 79. The children ranged in age from 15 to 8.

According to the story in The Tribune, Mr. and Mrs. Purucker had gone to Mishawaka to visit friends and had taken their 3-year-old daughter, Rita, 3, with them. Their oldest daughter, 18-year-old Mary, was in downtown South Bend.

Much like with the fire Jan. 21, the blaze that engulfed the Puruckers’ River Park home was so intense that the responding firefighters were unable to reach the victims on the second floor to rescue them.

The Hoover family

Another similarly tragic residential fire occurred less than a year later, on Feb. 3, 1930, when four children in the Hoover family died, according to a Feb. 4, 1930, story in The Tribune.

William and Pearl Hoover and their five oldest children had moved to South Bend four years earlier from Cass County, Mich. Three more children were born in South Bend, the last one slightly more than two months before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

The Great Depression hit the Hoover family hard, The Tribune reported, and food could be scarce.

When that happened, The Tribune reported, their oldest son, 9-year-old William Charles, would “trudge down to Notre Dame and they’d give him a basket of food scraps from the dining hall.”

But by early February 1930, “things were looking brighter” for William and Pearl Hoover and their eight children.

“The snow didn’t blow in around the windows anymore,” The Tribune wrote, and a man had promised William Hoover “steady work soon,” he had told his wife before leaving for the day to cut wood for “a dollar or two” at a neighbor’s property.

But about 2:30 p.m. Feb. 3, their four-room house on Hepler Street caught fire. It took “only a few minutes before there was nothing but smoking embers and bricks,” The Tribune reported.

Pearl Hoover, who had gone to a neighbor’s house to grind coffee, ran into the house in an attempt to save her five youngest children. She succeeded in saving only 18-month-old Harvey, who had been in the kitchen while the others were trapped upstairs.

Ranging in age from 5 years to 5 months, Herbert Earl, Mabel May, Beatrice Lucille and Raymond J. died in the fire.

At least on the day of the fire, The Tribune reported, a cause for it couldn't be determined.

Former Tribune reporter Margaret Fosmoe contributed to this story.

Email Tribune staff writer Andrew S. Hughes at ahughes@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: 1929 was probably when South Bend had its deadliest residential fire