Hannah Harriet Chattin and the Brooksbrae fire (1917)

Fire at the brick plant

After a fire in the watchman’s building at the Brooksbrae brick plant near Pasadena, residents saw two bodies on a cot but could not enter before the roof threatened to collapse. They tried to pull the cot toward a window with timbers; it overturned. When the ruins cooled, authorities recovered the badly burned remains of twelve-year-old Hannah Harriet Chattin and the plant watchman, Gildo Plazziano, whose surname and nationality are inconsistently rendered by OCR.

Hannah was the daughter of Samuel Chattin of Pasadena. Her mother understood that she had gone to help Plazziano wallpaper his room. Reports said the longtime watchman was considered eccentric locally and was fond of the child. Ocean County Sheriff Alfred Brown asserted that Plazziano lured Hannah into the building, shot her, set the fire and killed himself. Officers searched the ruins for the revolver. That reconstruction is the sheriff’s reported theory; the preserved clippings do not supply forensic findings or an inquest verdict.

A 1915 New Jersey census record places Samuel Chatten in Seaside Park Borough with Eva, Isiah, Hannah, Silas and John Chatten. The spelling variants Chattin, Chatten, Plazziano and Plazianno should all be used when searching records.

People and place connections

George Bozarth and Charles Halloway of Chatsworth assisted at the fire. Prosecutor Plumer, Sheriff Brown, and Coroner Brouwer attended the scene. Reports say the remains were taken to Tuckerton, the Chattin family’s home area. Hannah’s father, Samuel S. Chattin, was a team driver who had worked for Seaside Park mayor Mathis. Genealogical records identify Samuel’s parents as Civil War veteran William Wood Chattin and Harriet L. Crane Chattin; Hannah evidently shared her grandmother’s given name.

Plazziano had been convicted in 1914 of illegally selling liquor from his shack. Newspapers also revived an earlier fatal fire across from the plant, but that history is contextual and does not prove the sheriff’s account of the 1917 deaths.