South Branch Intelligencer

New Orleans, May 15.

Awful Catastrophe. The three story brick building on the south side of Canal street, and between Camp and Magazine streets, occupied as the Planters' Hotel, and kept by Charles Armstrong, fell to the earth last night at about half past two o'clock. Repairs had lately been making in the lower story, and it is presumed that too much of the support had been incautiously cut away.

The hotel was occupied as an eating and lodging house, and, it is calculated, contained, at the moment of the dreadful accident, between sixty and seventy inmates. The billiard room, which had been very full till late at night, had closed only a short time before. A young gentleman who left it but a few minutes before the fall of the building, states that he passed to the opposite side of the street, to his boarding house, went up to the gallery in front, where he heard three distinct and loud cracks, resembling the discharge of small cannon, then a sound like an earthquake, as the mass fell, and for a moment after, one, and only one, appalling cry, as if by the united voices of the sufferers! The alarm was directly given to the citizens, the bells rung, and engine companies turned out.

Number two distinguished herself again in the cause of humanity. Dr. Campbell was immediately on the spot rendering surgical and medical aid. At half past three o'clock about fifteen of the sufferers had been rescued from rubbish and saved. The voices of many could be heard under the crushed mass, and when we left to make this brief notice, hundreds of citizens were exerting themselves to extricate the mangled and bruised bodies of the victims of this awful casualty.

We understand that there were about fifty persons in the Planters' Hotel at the time of its fall. In the course of the day there were taken out dead the body of a gentleman from Yellow Banks, Ky. of the name of Hanna, a lawyer of much respectability; the body of Mr. Mooney, the superintendent of the tables of the Hotel. and the body of a Mr. Hopkins, who had been during the past season attached to the Circus Company playing here.

It is thought there are still several, four or five, buried in the ruins. More than forty have escaped with life; some wholly free from hurt; some slightly injured, but many shockingly mangled; all of whom, however, it is believed, will survive.

We are informed that none of the props or support of the house had been diminished during the process of repair, but that the accident can only be attributed to the age, defects, and deficiency of one of the walls.