Cities and disaster
The Chicago fire of 1871
What happened?
In October 1871 in the American city of Chicago, on the south-west shore of Lake Michigan, barely 1.5 inches (3 centimetres) of rain had fallen since the 4 July. The West Division – where wood-built homes and factories had been erected cheek by jowl and many of the roads were ‘paved’ with wooden planks – was a tinder box. At 13 DeKoven Street, labourer Patrick O'Leary, his wife Catherine and their five children lived in the rear rooms of a small cottage. Behind this was the barn from which Mrs O'Leary conducted her neighbourhood milk business, less than a mile from the centre of Chicago.
On Sunday, 8 October, just before 9pm, a fire broke out in the barn – how, nobody knows, but popular myth ascribes the cause to one of Mrs O’Leary’s cows kicking over a lantern. Fires had been frequent events all over Chicago; firefighters had battled a big one only the day before. Now exhausted, they were sent to the wrong location, and when they finally arrived at the O’Leary’s barn, the fire was raging out of control.
It quickly spread to the east and north, flying embers allowing it to cross the Chicago River. Wooden houses and mansions and commercial and industrial buildings all fell to the blaze. It raged for two days, until rain finally helped the firefighters put it out.
As the city burned, there were increasing reports of looting, drinking and arson. The day after the fire, the Chicago Evening Journal stated:
The city is infested with a horde of thieves, burglars, and cut-throats, bent on plunder, and who will not hesitate to burn, pillage, and even murder, as opportunity may seem to offer to them to do so with safety.
The ‘preservation of the good order and peace of the city’ was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Philip Sheridan, whose previous claim to fame had been as the Union commander of the brutal ‘March to the Sea’ following the capture of Atlanta during the Civil War. For two weeks, Sheridan oversaw martial law of dubious legitimacy, enforced by regular troops, militia units, police and the ‘First Regiment of Chicago Volunteers’. They patrolled the streets, guarded warehouses full of food and supplies intended for those affected by the fire, and enforced curfews and other regulations.
To aid the homeless, who numbered at least 100,000, the mayor put together the Relief and Aid Committee, consisting of businessmen and professionals who believed that the city’s future was dependent on the re-establishment of a defined social order from the chaos of the fire. They administered the distribution of food, supplies and contributions from across the country and the world that eventually totalled about $5 million. A model of a new kind of ‘scientific’ charity, its work was conducted by paid professionals carrying out the policies of the executive board.
What was the cost?
When the fire was finally extinguished, it was seen that, although the O’Leary cottage had miraculously survived, what came to be known as the ‘Burnt District’ encompassed an area four miles long and a quarter of a mile wide – more than 2,000 acres – including more than 28 miles of streets and 120 miles of pavements. Some 18,000 buildings worth $200 million – about a third of the value of the entire city – had been destroyed, including the entire central business district.
Thousands of ordinary people suffered severely. The fire had consumed everything they owned, not to mention their sources of income. If they had had any insurance at all, there was a more than even chance that it had been with one of the local companies that failed after the fire. If they had perished, it was very possible that they had no one to record their passing, especially if they had not had any nearby relatives. Estimates of the fatalities, which ranged between 2 and 300, seem surprisingly low ...
What was the disaster’s legacy?
To some, both the quantity and the quality of the ruins seemed to endow this upstart American city with a place in history. ‘No city can equal now the ruins of Chicago, not even Pompeii, much less Paris,’ E J Goodspeed bragged in his history of the fire.
However, it is important to remember just how much of the city was not destroyed, including most heavy industry and the rail infrastructure. And the fire could not touch Chicago's most important feature: its location. It was this that made it accessible to resources and markets throughout the globe at a time when the US was taking over world leadership in industrial enterprise.
Chicago entrepreneur John S Wright declared: ‘Five years will give Chicago more men, more money, more business, than she would have had without this fire … Chicago is not burnt up, only well blistered for bad ailments, to strengthen her for manhood [sic].’ (Shortly after he wrote this, Wright’s family was forced to commit him to an asylum.)
After a brief downturn in the financial markets, the city's rebuilding began in earnest. The rubble was swept away, a sizable proportion of it pushed into the lake to create new real estate. The flames had cleared the way to double the size of the downtown area and for the construction of taller buildings there, which led, in less than two decades, to the first skyscrapers. However, the rapid pace of rebuilding, assisted by the innovative use of derricks, led to an extraordinary number of construction injuries and deaths.
In the November 1871 mayoral election, Chicagoans voted in Tribune co-owner Joseph Medill on a ‘Union Fire Proof’ ticket that pledged stricter building codes. However, despite the disaster, improvements were slow to come. In July 1874, fire again struck the city, destroying another 50 acres and more than 800 buildings. But it was only when insurers threatened a boycott that the city was compelled to adopt stricter safety rules and improve the fire department.
Despite these ongoing problems, by 1873 the city was ready to celebrate its recovery, hosting a jubilee week in June. In the same year, its business leaders hosted the Inter-State Industrial Exposition on the lakefront. Chicago, as an inspirational post-fire song went, was ‘Queen of the West once more’. The population topped 500,000 by 1880, and numbered more than one million a decade later.
