HISTORY
THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE OCTOBER 1871 REMEMBERING ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE OCTOBER 1871
The Great Chicago Fire burned ferociously through the city from October 8th to October 10th, 1871, destroyed thousands of buildings and killing an estimated 300 people. The devastation wrought by the conflagration at the time cost an estimated $200 million in damages. The legend goes that the fire was caused by a cow kicking over a lantern in a barn, however other theories surrounding the blaze have laid the blame at arsonists or the possibility that even a meteor might have been responsible for the event that left an area of about four miles long and almost a mile wide of the Windy City, including its business district, in complete ruins. Following the blaze, reconstruction efforts began quickly and spurred great economic development and population growth. Whatever actually started the fire, there is little dispute of where it started. It had been subsequently proven that on the Sunday evening of October 8, 1871, something ignited a fire inside the barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary at 137 De Koven St. on Chicago’s west side. After the flames had finally subsided on Tuesday morning, the Great Fire had consumed more than three square miles (some 2,000 acres) of the city, taken 300 lives and left 100,000 without homes, which was around a third of the city’s population. Believe it or not, the O’Leary’s house was located upwind of the fire and survived totally undamaged. In the aftermath of the fire 51 people who were near the fire when it broke out, along with experts brought in to examine the scene, came to the conclusion that it was unable to identify the cause. This resulted in a host of other theories being speculated on in the wider community. Apparently there were some inconsistencies in the testimonies of Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan and Dennis Regan. Sullivan’s house was located across the road and to the east of the O’Leary’s. He testified that, after visiting the O’Leary’s, he walked across the road, proceeded past his own house, then sat in front of William White’s house, one door up. Sullivan said he could see the fire break out later and ran to the O’Leary’s to help save the animals. This didn’t quite add up for the authorities, due to the fact that the view from William White’s house to the O’Leary barn was
NOTORIOUS INFERNOS blocked by the James Dalton house. Regan testified that he heard music as he passed the McLaughlin house, where a party had been going on, on his way to help with the fire. This also didn’t match up with other testimony given by Mrs. McLaughlin who said that the fire had started after the music stopped. Locals had suggested a theory that the two men were in the barn, where they had been hundreds of times and began to argue. In the midst of a fight they perhaps accidentally knocked Mr. Sullivan’s pipe from his hand, leaving it on the ground and sparking the initial flames. Another theory surrounding the cause of the fire is that it may have been ignited by a fragment of a rogue comet that touched off upstate Wisconsin and Michigan on the same night. Scientists have speculated that fragments from Biela’s Comet could have ignited the Great Fire in Chicago but it has often been rejected. Chicago at the time was a place where the manufacturing East met the agricultural West of the U.S. This was also a time when the nation was beginning to flex its financial muscles on the international stage. There was an ever-increasing influx of people, money, goods, and information. There was the lake front and the branches of the Chicago River, which split the city into north, south, and west; each sector buzzing with commercial activity. Ten railroads converged on Chicago. The city was linked by rail coast to coast. Seventeen grain elevators had a total capacity of about 12 million bushels. The city had averaged about two fires a day during the previous year, including 20 in the previous week. The largest of those had occurred on the Saturday night, on the eve of the “Great Fire.” After the fire began at the O’Leary’s it surged straight to the centre of town, aided by gusting winds. The blaze then unexpectedly jumped the South Branch of the Chicago River around midnight. Splitting in two yet again, the fire consumed Conley’s Patch, a shanty town of Irish immigrants. These were tightly packed wooden structures that offered no resistance to the blaze. By 1:30 the raging fire had made its way to the city’s
courthouse tower. City officials released the prisoners’ moments before the great bell came crashing through the ceiling of the basement of the building. In the south side of the city, the offices of the Chicago Tribune, whose editors throughout the summer had railed against lax fire safety standards, were completely destroyed. The fire was now so massive and widespread that even the ground was in flames. The streets and bridges were all made of wood which provided sufficient fuel for the inferno. The river was also vulnerable, as several vessels on the water and grease that had been dumped along the banks of the river also ignited. The runaway inferno was now showing signs of what fire fighters call a “convection effect.” This is where a fire has the ability produce a concentrated updraft allowing it to move forward on its own accord without help from any wind. Air from all directions was getting sucked into the centre of the flame. This generated a whirlwind effect that carried flaming debris high into the sky. The flaming debris landed onto the city waterworks, destroying the structure and effectively shutting down any firefighting efforts. As the fire marched relentlessly north, another phenomenon known as spontaneous combustion resulted in buildings bursting into flames without coming into contact with the main body of the fire. In the North Division of the city, tens of thousands of ethnic Scandinavians and Germans had more time to escape than those in Conley’s Patch, yet nearly all suffered the same fate — the loss of whatever dwelling in which they had resided. Miraculously, only the mansion of real estate millionaire Mahlon D. Ogden was spared from the flames, saved by a shift in the wind. Eventually the fire reached the edge of the city with only prairie grass and dry sod to feed the flames, and expired on its own. The burned-out, bedraggled, and newly homeless flocked together in disoriented groups on open stretches of prairie west and northwest of town; in the South Division, refugees huddled along Lake Michigan, in the North Division, they hunkered down at the south end of Lincoln Park and along “the Sands,” a scrap of lake shore just north of the river.
