Chicago's Great Fire

The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City

Carl Smith

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780802148117
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A definitive chronicle of the 1871 Chicago Fire as remembered by those who experienced it—from the author of Chicago and the American Literary Imagination. Over three days in October, 1871, much of Chicago, Illinois, was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in the intervening decades—and much of the hastily-built city was made of wood. Starting in Catherine and Patrick O'Leary's barn, the Fire quickly grew out of control, twice jumping branches of the Chicago River on its relentless path through the city's three divisions. While the death toll was miraculously low, nearly a third of Chicago residents were left homeless and more were instantly unemployed. This popular history of the Great Chicago Fire approaches the subject through the memories of those who experienced it. Chicago historian Carl Smith builds the story around memorable characters, both known to history and unknown, including the likes of General Philip Sheridan and Robert Todd Lincoln. Smith chronicles the city's rapid growth and its place in America's post-Civil War expansion. The dramatic story of the fire—revealing human nature in all its guises—became one of equally remarkable renewal, as Chicago quickly rose back up from the ashes thanks to local determination and the world's generosity. As we approach the fire's 150th anniversary, Carl Smith's compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle. "The best book ever written about the fire, a work of deep scholarship by Carl Smith that reads with the forceful narrative of a fine novel. It puts the fire and its aftermath in historical, political and social context. It's a revelatory pleasure to read." — Chicago Tribune

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“KATE! THE BARN IS AFIRE!”

At seven o’clock on the morning of Sunday, October 8, 1871, Chief Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams decided he could finally take a break. Williams had been up all night battling a horrendous fire that started between ten and eleven o’clock Saturday night in the boiler room of the Lull & Holmes Planing mill. The mill was in a two-story sixty-by-eighty-foot brick building on South Canal Street between Jackson and Van Buren Streets in the West Division, just across the South Branch of the Chicago River from the downtown. Local insurance men dubbed the area in which the building was located the Red Flash.

There was good reason for the gallows humor. Everything in the vicinity was poised to burn. The mill was full of raw wood and sawdust, while next door was a cardboard box factory. The neighborhood was dotted with coal and lumber yards. Two of these yards contained between them more than seven million feet of dry pine, enough to build a small village. Or feed a large fire.

People rushed to the scene to take in the spectacle of sight, sound, and smell—the mesmerizing dance of the flames, the crackle and crash of tumbling beams, the acrid smoke—and thrill at the firemen’s battle to contain it all. The “dense fiery glow of the destroying element,” which illuminated the area all around it, “made up a panorama of grand but terrible features,” the Chicago Tribune reported. The fire devastated four city blocks, about sixteen acres, inflicting damages estimated at $750,000. Once the flames burned out on Sunday afternoon, smoldering coal piles continued to glow ominously, like the eyes of a fire-breathing dragon only pretending to sleep.

The Saturday Night Fire was the most serious of more than two dozen conflagrations in Chicago during that past week alone. On September 30 the contents of Burlington Railroad’s twenty-two-thousand-square-foot Warehouse A had caught fire. The warehouse was crammed with cases of liquor and stacks of dried cornstalks used for making brooms, all highly combustible. By the time the fire was put out, the building, valued at more than $600,000, was a total loss and a Burlington employee was dead.

Firemen blamed boys smoking for the destruction the following day of a two-family brick residence near the lakefront south of the downtown. That same afternoon a careless roofer set off a blaze in the Chicago and North Western Railway freight office. As the week unfolded, a church, a hotel, a furniture factory, a butcher shop, and several barns and dwellings were hit. The fire department attributed these fires to causes ranging from more worker carelessness and mischievous boys to defective chimneys and outright arson.

While it might seem otherwise, Chicago had been lucky. Almost no rain—less than an inch and a half—had fallen since early July, which had left everything so dry that a wayward spark could prove catastrophic. A persistent October heat wave—reaching eighty degrees by afternoon—and strong prevailing winds out of the southwest put everybody on edge. As the family of seven-year-old A. S. Chapman rode their carriage to church Sunday morning “into the teeth of a withering gale from the southwest,” Chapman’s father voiced a thought on many minds: “If a fire should start, Chicago will burn up.”

Before Chief Williams could slip gratefully into bed, he was summoned to another fire, a small one. Once this was out, he returned home and at last made it to sleep. He awakened at 2:15 p.m., washed his face, and put on clean clothes. Williams, who had missed breakfast, went downstairs to join his wife Harriet, back from church, for lunch. Williams then walked to the nearby station where his driver had the chief marshal’s horse and wagon hitched up. He wanted to check on the state of the Saturday Night Fire and the condition of his men and equipment.

Williams learned that the fire had severely weakened the department. At full strength, it consisted of about 190 men serving in seventeen steam fire engine companies, four hook and ladder companies, and six hose companies. Even before the Saturday Night Fire, one of the hose companies was not in service, and one of the fire engines, Liberty No. 7, was in the shop. The Saturday Night Fire destroyed the truck used by Pioneer Hook and Ladder Company No. 1, and the William James Engine No. 3 needed extensive repairs. Hoses and protective gear had also been damaged. The firefighters were in even worse shape. About one-third of the force was incapacitated by exhaustion and exposure to the smoke, glare, and unrelenting heat. Of the approximately 125 remaining, many could barely open their swollen and bloodshot eyes.

Chicago Chief Fire Marshal Robert A. Williams. In his lap is a speaking trumpet, a megaphone through which officers shouted orders during a fire. (Chicago History Museum, ICHi-012924)

Williams was back home in time for supper, after which he and Harriet planned to visit Mathias Benner, one of his three assistant marshals, and Benner’s wife Mary. On the way, the chief received word of yet another fire, which canceled the social call.

It was a false alarm, a common occurrence. On his way home, Williams had trouble keeping his hat on his head because of gusts from the southwest. He had a premonition of more trouble to come. “I felt it in my bones,” he remembered, that “we were going to have a ‘burn.’ ” He decided that the best thing to do was get some more sleep.

Williams was back in bed around eight o’clock. Before he lay down, he set out his coat, helmet, and boots, so if need be he could “jump into them.” He asked Harriet, who was reading in the parlor, to close the door to the bedroom so the light would not disturb him.

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Patrick and Catherine O’Leary lived with their five children—two girls and three boys, ranging from a fifteen-year-old to an infant—about three quarters of a mile south of the Saturday Night Fire, on the north side of DeKoven Street, some two hundred feet east of Jefferson Street. A local reporter described the neighborhood, one of the most densely populated sections of the city, as “a terra incognita to respectable Chicagoans,” packed with “one-story frame dwellings, cow-stables, corn-cribs, sheds innumerable; every wretched building within four feet of its neighbor, and everything of wood.”

Catherine O’Leary was about forty, and Patrick O’Leary a few years older. They were both immigrants from Ireland, he from County Kerry in the southwest and she from adjoining County Cork. They married before departing for America in 1845, at the onset of the potato blight that starved the country and killed or drove out more than 20 percent of the population over the next half dozen years. They had first lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Patrick had enlisted to serve in the Union Army.

Patrick was an unskilled laborer, earning perhaps $1.50 to $2.00 a day when he found work. Catherine kept house and conducted a small dairy business in the neighborhood. By this time most milk arrived by train from the surrounding countryside, but it struck no one as unusual that a family, whether wealthy or poor, might keep farm animals well within the city limits. Catherine O’Leary sheltered her four cows, a calf, and the horse that pulled her milk wagon in the barn behind their home. The livestock was an important source of income in which she and Patrick had made a significant investment. She had taken delivery of two tons of timothy hay for the animals the day before. The O’Learys had also recently received and stored in the barn a supply of wood shavings and coal for cooking and to keep them warm in colder days ahead.

A person of generous inclination might call the O’Leary home a cottage, but it was not much more than a ramshackle shanty, sixteen feet wide and about twice that deep. Like thousands of others throughout the city, it consisted of a frame made of two-by-fours covered with bare pine shingles and roofed with tar paper. Houses like this were easy and inexpensive to build because of the availability of standardized milled lumber and machine-made nails. This kind of structure was well suited to circumstances where speed and economy mattered more than solidity.

The seven O’Learys shared two rooms. They enjoyed little natural light since there was only a single small window on each of their home’s four sides. The building had no foundation. Instead, wooden supports raised it a few feet above the bare ground. The rough planks that covered the gaps between these supports helped cut the wind but were hardly enough to keep the winter cold from seeping up through the floor. A stove vented with a simple brick chimney provided heat and a place to cook. Chicago streets were lit by gas, as were better offices, stores, homes, many of which also had indoor plumbing. Chicago working people like the O’Learys relied on the light of lanterns and candles, fetched water from public pumps, and used a privy.

The O’Leary family lived in the rear cottage and rented the front one to their tenants, the McLaughlins. Like most Chicago streets, DeKoven Street was unpaved. Wooden fences and sidewalks, which were commonplace throughout the city, were very flammable. From a stereograph by J. H. Abbott, 1871. (Chicago History Museum, ICHi-002741)

Humble as it was, this dwelling was possibly better than what Catherine and Patrick had known in Ireland. Most important, it was theirs. Many Chicagoans even as poor as the O’Learys owned their homes, spare as those homes might be. In fact, the O’Learys owned two very similar houses, one right behind the other on their twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot lot, as well as the sixteen-by-twenty-foot back barn. The second house provided rental income. Multiple buildings jammed together like this were commonplace. The O’Learys’ current tenants were the McLaughlins, also Irish born and named Catherine and Patrick, and their toddler, Mary Ann.

Virtually all their neighbors were immigrants, mostly from Bohemia as well as Ireland. Timothy and Katie Murray lived in a cottage just to the west, James and Katie Dalton and their five children in one to the east. Murray was a carpenter, and Dalton was an unskilled laborer like Patrick O’Leary. Daniel Sullivan lived across the street with his mother. The twenty-six-year-old Sullivan earned his living driving a dray, a heavy-duty delivery wagon. A gregarious and garrulous man who favored his pipe, Sullivan was an easily recognizable figure on DeKoven Street since he hobbled about on a wooden leg.

The O’Learys turned in about the same time as Chief Fire Marshal Williams. Catherine, who was nursing a sore foot, would have to awaken a little after 4:00 a.m. to milk her cows. Daniel Sullivan came by to chat the O’Learys up, but he left when he discovered they had already gone to bed. As Catherine and Patrick dropped off to sleep, they could hear through the wall quadrilles ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Carl Smith
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• A Note on Sources
• Dollar Values and Street Names
• 1. “Kate! The Barn Is Afire!”
• 2. “To Depress Her Rising Consequence Would Be Like an Attempt to Quench the Stars”
• 3. “A Regular Nest of Fire”: The West Division
• 4. “It Was Nothing but Excitement”: The South Division
• 5. “I Gave Up All Hopes of Being Able to Save Much of Anything”: The North Division
• 6. Endgame
• 7. “Pray for Me”
• 8. “Chicago Shall Rise Again”
• 9. Controversy and Control
• 10. “More Strength and Greater Hope”: Getting Going
• 11. The Triumph of the Fire-Proof Ticket
• 12. Who Started the Great Chicago Fire?
• 13. The Limits of Limits
• 14. New Chicago
• 15. City on Fire
• 16. Celebrating Destruction
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index