On the night of October 8, 1871, a seemingly innocuous fire began in a barn to the southwest of the central part of the city of Chicago, Illinois, known as the Near West Side. By the end of the next day, a major portion of the city including the downtown business district lay in ashes. What caused this great calamity, and why was it so severe?
The Stage Was Set for a Conflagration: Chicago and the entire surrounding region had endured an extended drought establishing dry conditions throughout. The wind that night was blowing from the southwest to the northeast out over Lake Michigan and reached up to as much as sixty miles per hour at times. Like most American cities of the day, buildings and residences were made primarily of wood—over two-thirds of all structures in the city large and small. Most of the buildings used tar and felt on the roofs, and the residences used shingles making the roofs highly combustible. Further, wood dominated a high proportion of sidewalks and city streets. The Chicago City Fire Department had just 185 firefighters and seventeen horse-drawn steam pumping wagons to combat fires throughout the city. Although this size of a force seemed adequate for most modest fires, it was not long before the Fire Department was overwhelmed on October 8. Major fires from various causes, have burned large portions of other American cities of the era such as Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta as they were likewise made of wood. During the period from the last week of September to the second week of October, there were a series of fires, some of them serious, that plagued several other areas of the Midwest that year. The week before the Great Fire, Chicago had as many as twenty smaller fires that the Fire Department had to control and extinguish.
Did It All Begin with a Cow? Legend has it that the fire began in a barn where Mrs. Catherine O’Leary was milking a cow that inadvertently kicked over a kerosene lamp, starting a fire. This assertion was flatly denied by the O’Leary family as they indicated that the entire family had gone to be before the fire started. City Officials were never able to ascertain the exact starting point of the fire, and other theories about its origins surfaced, but the O’Leary’s cow was the one seized upon by the press. The truth in all matters was the shed next to the barn became the first structure to be consumed by the fire, and no one saw how it all began. The alarm was sent and the fire department’s response was timely, but the alarm box that alerted the fire-alarm office was a mile or so beyond the actual fire. The night watchman at the courthouse a mile or so away from the fire sent the first alarm. This inhibited the valuable first response as the firemen went toward the wrong spot, before seeing the fire off in a different direction. Witnesses said that it took ten to fifteen minutes for the first responders to arrive at the fire scene, whereas, the standard would have put them there within five minutes. The Fire Marshall arrived shortly after the first engine company, and immediately ordered a second and third alarm as the fire already had spread to other structures, and the gale-force wind was blowing sparks towards the center of the city. About the same time as the Fire Marshall’s arrival, the fire crossed the nearby south branch of the Chicago River. The fire made it to the single set of water works in the area taking out the only method for the pumping wagons to obtain water from the water system. The water works had no internal method to fight a fire on its wooden roof, and when it burned down, the fire department was hamstrung and virtually useless for any action away from the river. The court house cupola caught fire and the mayor ordered the prisoners in the basement to be evacuated. With the fire blazing, the wind picked up velocity fanning the flames everywhere in the immediate area. On the side of the river were lumber yards, coal yards, barges filled with coal, and wooden bridges providing fuel to keep the blaze going in the general direction of the wind toward the central downtown district. The barrage of cinders found its way on the other side of the river to a railroad car loaded with kerosene. As the conflagration widened and deepened the heat and wind factors gave way to fiery vortexes of circling flames resembling tornadoes of fire. The people caught up in the fire zone had nowhere else to go except east into Lake Michigan. The fire raged in a northeastern direction all the night and all through the next day until it reached the sparsely populated areas of the Near North Side. The next night as the fire began to die out, rain began to fall helping to finish off the flames.
The Extent of the Devastation: After the fire was completely out, the ruins continued to smolder making an accurate survey of all the damage difficult if not impossible to do for several more days. To help local authorities maintain order, Mayor Roswell B. Mason brought in Army Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, a Civil War cavalry commander, and a cohort of federal troops. They remained in place for two weeks until the local police were able to relieve them of their positions and responsibilities. As many as 300 people may have been killed in the fire—120 bodies were found, but an equal or greater number of victims may have either been incinerated by the flames or washed away in the river. Another 90,000 or so were homeless. About 17,450 structures were destroyed. The damages were estimated to be about $200 million in 1871 currency (in excess of $4 billion in today’s currency) or about one-third of the entire city’s valuation at the time. The area destroyed amounted to about 3.3 square miles of mostly downtown buildings and nearby residential areas. Also destroyed were more than 73 miles of roads (made out of wood), 120 miles of sidewalk (also wood), and 2,000 lampposts. The homeless total constituted about twenty-eight percent of the total population of the city (324,000). In spite of all of this, the city’s physical infrastructure of water, sewage, and rail transportation remained largely intact. Some interesting structures survived the fire: Buildings at 2323 and 2339 North Cleveland Avenue, St. Michael’s Church, the Chicago Water Tower, the Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, St. Ignatius Jesuit College, and 2121 North Hudson, the home of the Police Constable Louis Bellinger. The O’Leary’s house on DeKoven Street also survived the fire as the wind blew the flames and cinders in the other direction. The Water Tower is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
The Relief and Recovery Effort: There was no FEMA in place in 1871 to provide relief funding for the disaster. Insurance companies stepped up wherever they were involved, but a massive amount of relief came via donations from individuals, corporations, and other cities. New York City provided $450,000 plus clothing and other necessities, St. Louis donated $300,000. Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Buffalo donated large sums of money, and Milwaukee sent fire-fighting equipment. Donations of food, clothing and other items such as books came from far and wide. In England an effort to collect books to create an open library system in Chicago was successful in creating a donation of 8,000 books. In response to the effort the Chicago City Council established the Chicago Public Library to replace the fee-based membership system that local libraries had been using. Work began immediately to rewrite the building codes with an emphasis on stricter fire protections. The usage of bricks, concrete, and steel replaced much of the requirement for wood, which was still used in frame work and finishings. Twenty-two years later, the city hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) that attracted about 27.5 million visitors, or about half of the country’s population at the time.
Conclusions: In 1997 the Chicago City Council sought to put an end to the unfounded rumors that implicated Catherine O’Leary as the initiator of the fire, by exonerating Mrs. O’Leary and the cow from any responsibilities for the start of the fire. The remaining structures on the original O’Leary property were demolished in 1956 and replaced by the Quinn Fire Academy (Chicago Fire Department Training Facility). At the exact spot thought to be the fire’s origin, a bronze statue showing stylized flames entitled Pillar of Fire by Egon Weiner was installed in 1961.
Sources:
Wikipedia, Great Chicago Fire.
History.com, Great Chicago Fire Begins.
The Chicago Historical Society, The Great Chicago Fire and Web of Memory, 2011, The Official Report.
Picture by Currier and Ives.