Charley Lee Coe

Coe went into the house with another man. The dwelling was a small one-story house of flimsy construction, lined with heavy paper, and smoke and flames were already showing. Coe searched for the children by feel in the dense smoke. His companion, facing a wall of flame, pulled him toward safety, but Coe broke free and went back to the bed. The companion, burned on the hands and face, broke a door panel from outside, and Arnold was pushed out through it. Coe was found just inside the door he had entered, holding David. Both died of burns.

What the plaque says

Charley Lee Coe On February 6, 1923, Charley Lee Coe made a great sacrifice. Charley was an oil field driller and lived with his wife, Helen (Rosencrants), and three children in Newtown and then in Burkburnett. On the day he was to take his daughter to the Wichita County Fair, Coe saw a fire at a neighbor's house. Coe worked his way through the smoke-filled home and found Arnold and David Hahn (ages 3 and 1) trapped in a bedroom. A neighbor knocked out a door panel through which Arnold Hahn was saved. Flames then overtook the home and claimed the lives of Coe and David Hahn. In January 1924, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission established a pension for Coe's family and awarded him a posthumous Carnegie Gold Medal for his brave actions. (2012)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 13 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 14 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 26 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 29 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• First National Bank of Burkburnett — steps away
• Fowler Discovery Well — 0.6 mi
• John Gerham Hardin — 0.6 mi
• Samuel Burk Burnett — 0.7 mi