Large fire of Chicago

The large fire of Chicago is a catastrophe which has occurred of the October 8th to the October 10th 1871. The fire made hundreds of victims and destroyed in their totality of many districts of Chicago in Illinois. Although the fire is one of the greatest catastrophes to the 19th century with the the United States, the rebuilding which started immediately after made it possible Chicago to better develop from an economic point of view and to become one of the most populated cities North America.

Origin of the fire

The fire started on Sunday, October 8 around 9 p.m. in or around a small hangar located at the 137 DeKoven Street.

The most known history wants that this fire was started by a cow having street in a lamp in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O' Leary with the address indicated above. Catherine O' Leary was perfect the Scapegoat: she was a woman, immigrant and catholic - a combination which was not worth large thing in the political climate of Chicago of the time. The history circulated already in Chicago before even as the flames do not die out and it was published in the first edition of the Chicago Tribune after the fire. Michael Ahern, the journalist who had invented this history of cow, admitted itself in 1893 qu ' it had very imagined because it thought of making a high article colors.

More recently, the historian amateur Richard Bales concluded from there that fire would have initially occurred when Daniel Sullivan, who was the first to inform the authorities of the events, ignited hay in the barn while it tried to fly of milk. However, of the evidence lately highlighted in the Chicago Tribune by Anthony DeBartolo suggest that Louis Mr. Cohn could have started fire during part of play of Des. In a text now disappeared, Cohn would have acknowledged to have started the fire, according to Alan Wykes in its book The Complete Illustrated Guide to Gambling .

Another theory, evoked for the first time in 1882, is that the large fire of Chicago was started by a rain of meteorites. At the time of a conference of 2004 of the Aerospace Corporation and American Institute off Aeronautics and Astronautics, the engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that fire started following the explosion of the Comet of Biela above Midwest. That four hearths of fire were décalarés, the same day on banks of the Lake Michigan (close cf Événements), pleasing to think of a common cause. Visual witnesses reported spontaneous combustions, the absence of smoke, " balls of feu" falling from the sky and non luminous flames. According to Wood, these reports/ratios make think that the hearths of fires were started by the Méthane generally contained by comets. Another theory speaks about a release of the fire by children having smoked the pipe in a heap of hay.

Speed of the fire

When the fire started, the neighbors precipitated to protect the house from O' Leary opposite the cattle shed from where fire came; it has besides suffers only minor damage. However, the firemen received the first alarm only with 21:40 and of strong winds blew since south-west, in direction of the downtown area. Very quickly, fire was propagated in the vicinity. Extreme winds led the flames to the North-East and fire passed the southern branch of the Chicago_ (river) after midnight. What helped the progression of the fire was the proximity between the wood buildings, the pavements raised out of wood of the city, the boats encumbering the river and the presence of wood and coal to the sale along the river. The amplitude of the furnace generated winds and a heat so important that roofs ignited well far from the places where the fire made rage. During its passage in the district of the businesses, fire destroyed hotels, department stores, the Town hall, the opera and theaters, churches and printing works. Fire continued its progression in north, involving the runaways along the bridges spanning Chicago. The fire jumped the northern branch of the river and continued through houses and villas of the northern part of the city. Inhabitants ended up reaching the Lincoln Park and the banks of the Lake Michigan, where thousands of them found refuge.

Fire ends up dying out, helped in that by the disappearance of the winds and a fine rain which ends up falling late into the night from Monday. Of its starting point of the house O' Leary it practically burned 48 blocks to the Fullerton avenue in north.

Once the extinguished fire, the debris was too hot to allow a complete inventory of the damage before several days. Finally, fire destroyed a surface of 6 kilometers (4 miles) by 1 kilometer (3/4 miles), that is to say approximately 8 km ² (2 000 acres). This space included/understood more than 120 kilometers of road, 190 kilometers of pavements, 2.000 standard lamps, 17.500 buildings and 222 million dollars in land value is a third of the full value of the city. Of the 300.000 inhabitants, 100.000 were without shelters. The local newspapers reported that fire had been so devastating that it had exceeded the damage caused by Napoléon_Ier at the time of the head office of Moscow in 1812. Certain buildings left unscathed the fire of which the Chicago Water Tower (at the time very recent), which is today a semi-official memorial of the destroying power of the fire. It was one of the five only buildings accommodating of the public saved by the flames in the disaster area, another was the church of Holy Family (Holy Family Church) that the family O' Leary was accustomed to attending.

After the fire, 125 bodies were found. The final estimates go from 200 to 300 dead, which is finally little for a fire of such an intensity. In the following years, other catastrophes will cause deaths: 571 in the fire of the Iroquois theater in 1903, and 1915 835 people perished in the shipwreck of the Eastland boat on the Chicago river. However, the large fire of Chicago remains the most known disaster of the city, concerning its intensity and the subsequent capacity of the city to be rectified and thrive then.

The land speculators like Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard and the business men quickly set up the rebuilding of the city. Gifts of money, of food, clothing and furniture arrived quickly coming from the whole nation. The first authorizations of rebuilding were delivered the very same day extinction of the last burnt buildings. Only 22 years afterwards, Chicago counted more than 21 million visitors at the time of the World Fair Colomb.

In 1956, the remainders of the house of O' Leary were shaven for the construction of the Academy of the Firemen of Chicago, a camp of drive for the firemen of the city.

Close events

At the time of this heat and windy autumn, three other large fires took place along the Lake Michigan at the same time as the large fire of Chicago. Approximately 600 kilometers in north, a fire of meadow poked by strong winds destroyed the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin as well as a dozen other villages, killing between 1.200 and 2.500 people and devastated approximately 6.000 km ². Although the fire of Peshtigo was mortal of the American history, the distance of the area made that it was little known at the time. On the other side of the lake in the east, the town of Holland, Michigan and other neighbouring localities burned to the ground. With some 150 kilometers in the north of Holland, the village of loggers of Manistee, Michigan was also reached by a fire.

Sources

"People & Vents: The Great Fire off 1871". Public The Broadcasting System (PBS) Website. Retrieved Sep. 3,2004.
" History off the Great Fires in Chicago and the West". - Rev. Edgar J. Goodspeed, D.D., 677 pp.
Chicago and the Great Conflagration - Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, 1871,528 pp.
The Great Conflagration - James W. Sheahan and George P. Upton, 1871,458 pp.

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