You may have noticed that this is National Fire Protection Week. The annual event is marked by news stories
extolling the virtues of smoke alarms
and family fire evacuation drills. Your local fire station may host school field
trips or an open house—maybe they will let you climb on an engine or even slide
down a pole. Ask and you will be told
that this week was selected because the Great
Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871.
That fire was certainly
memorable. After breaking out in an
immigrant south side neighborhood, winds whipped flames north and west across
the sprawling city. It burned for two
days consuming 4 square miles, including the downtown business district,
killing an estimate 200-300 and leaving 90,000 people homeless. The fire originated in the O’Leary family barn (the house was
spared being up wind) but neither the lady of the house or her cow had anything
to do with it. Apparently neighborhood
layabouts set it off while shooting craps.
Word of the fire spread rapidly
across the country and within a week national publications were carrying first
hand accounts and illustration of the carnage.
The city famously rose from the ashes, replacing its largely ramshackle
wooden buildings with modern—and fire resistant—brick and stone. In less than a decade the city had not only
fully recovered, it had double again in size.
But the fire in Chicago was not the
only conflagration that day. After an
extended long drought that covered the entire upper Midwest, a fast moving cold front drove intense winds before
it. Fires swept Holland and Manistee, Michigan and swaths of surrounding areas on the west shore
of Lake Michigan. More than 200 died when another fire consumed
Port Huron, Michigan on the southern
shores of Lake Huron.
As devastating as those fires were, they all paled compared to the great
fire in Wisconsin’s North Woods
centered on the lumber town of Peshtigo. Despite tinder dry conditions, careless
neglect sparked several fires in the area that had burned more or less
unchecked for several days before the fire.
These fires were attributed to cinders from railroad locomotive smoke
stacks, small heating and cooking fires left untended by hunters, farmers
burning to clear brush or the tree tops stripped from logging operations. Local experience was that these fires would
burn themselves out or be extinguished by the early snows expected in the
region by mid October. The night before
the big fire survivors reported seeing several small blazes on surrounding
hills.
By the evening of the October 8 high winds were merging the fires, which
began to move on broad fronts burning, among other things, the telegraph lines
that Peshtigo and another dozen small towns could have used to signal for help. By the time a wall of flame erupted over a
ridge near town, the fire was roaring with unprecedented fury, moving at high
speed directly on the town. Residents
had little time to gather possessions and attempt to flee before the town
itself was engulfed. By then the fire
was traveling from tree-top to tree top creating its own cyclonic winds,
including at least one “tornado of fire”
witnessed by several survivors. The
firestorm fed itself creating
internal winds of up to 80 miles an hour ripping the roofs of houses, blowing
over barns, uprooting trees, and tossing a 1,000 lb. wagon like tumbleweed.
Before it was over the fire burned
over 1.2 million acres. Winds carried
embers to both sides of the Peshtigo
River and across Green Bay where
it burned the Door Peninsula from Dykesville almost to Sturgeon Bay to the north. Sixteen towns were totally destroyed. In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost. The total death toll will never be known exactly
because town records across the region were destroyed and whole families wiped
out. In addition hundreds of lumber
workers, isolated small farmers, hunters and trappers were in the woods with no
way to determine their fate. Best
estimates of the death toll range from 1,200 to over 2,000.
Word of the Peshtigo fire and the
other disasters in the north was overwhelmed by news from Chicago. To this day the largest loss of life by fire
in American history remains little known outside of Wisconsin and among fire
historians.
During World War II, however, the Army
Air Force was aware of the historic firestorm. It commissioned American and British scientists to study it to find
ways of duplicating the firestorm through incendiary bombing. The destruction of Dresden, Germany by fire storm, which took more lives than either
of the atomic bombs used against Japan, was partly the result of that
research.
Today a museum in Peshtigo
commemorates the fire. It has very few
relics of the town—almost everything burned up except for one house freshly
built of green lumber. Among the few
artifacts of the fire are the Tabernacle
from the Catholic Church which
was saved by survivor Father Peter
Pernin by submersing it in the river, a melted can of peas, some fused
ceramics, a chard piece of lumber from the surviving house, and artifacts
recently dug up, including a Bible discovered
opened to Psalms.
Despite the fact that conditions
across the region were perfect for wide spread fire, that many eyewitness
accounts of numerous fires burning for days around the town, and that the
origin of the Chicago fire can be traced to the O’Leary barn, speculation that
the fires had some common origin has gone on for years. As early as 1883 there was speculation that the
fires across the region might have been caused by impact of debris from the Comet Biela, which was observed to
break up in its 1854 appearance. The
intersection of the projected route of the comet’s return in November 1872 was
marked by an intense meteor shower.
The 1985
book Mrs.
O'Leary’s Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire by Mel Waskin revived that theory. In 2007 Robert
M. Wood published a scholarly article in the Journal of the American Institute
of Aeronautics and Astronautics which calculated that gravitational
pull of Jupiter when debris of the
comet crossed its path may have accelerated the arrival of that debris by as
much as a year. Observations of “fire
balls” falling from the sky in both the Peshtigo and Chicago fires might have
actually been burning gasses from the dead comet. Other experts remain skeptical of this
theory.
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