T
he great blaze that incinerated Peshtigo on October 8, 1871, was the worst disaster to strike Northeast Wisconsin in its entire history. Fires consumed more than 2,500 square miles of forest and countryside, snuffing out the lives of as many as 2,200 people. When Father Peter Pernin arrived in 1871 to serve as parish priest in both Peshtigo and Marinette, he was struck by the all pervasiveness of the forests. “Trees, trees everywhere, nothing but trees as far as you can travel from [Green Bay] either towards the north or west,” he remarked. But much of that wilderness would be gone by mid-autumn. It snowed little that winter, and was followed by a spring and summer parched dry by unrelenting drought. It rained the night of July 8, then not again until September 5. Rivers shrank, swamps went dry, and the slash that littered the landscape where timber had been cut turned to tinder. Fires carelessly neglected by farmers and the workers constructing the Chicago & North Western Railroad from Green Bay to Menominee left embers burning among dried leaves. Small fires smoldered in the underbrush for weeks sometimes flashed up to consume a few acres of forest. No one seemed much concerned, but on September 21, those small fires turned hostile. Conn’s sawmill at Little Suamico was destroyed, two nearby railroad camps burned out, and the telegraph line between Green Bay and Marinette swept away. Five days later a sawmill on the Pensaukee River, south of Oconto, burned and raging flames overtook Cooperstown in northern Manitowoc County. By then, dense, suffocating smoke hung over the entire region, and ships on Green Bay navigated by compass due to the terrible visibility. At night, people in Green Bay could see a “red glare in the heaven” in every direction and grew fearful of what Frank Tilton of the Green Bay Advocate described as “the awful carnival of death that was raging around [them].” Then, on Sunday, October 8, the entire community of New Frankin went up in flames in a matter of minutes. No one died, but the blaze continued northward into the area of Door County settled mostly by Belgian immigrants. Forty-five Belgians were
Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-1784, WHi-3728
These dramatic illustrations from Harper’s Weekly were seen all over the country. The fire in Chicago, which happened at the same time, wasn’t as devastating as the Peshtigo Fire. However, Chicago, despite its greater resources, was receiving the bulk of donations from around the country and the world. Frances Fairchild, the 24-year-old wife of Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild, recognized this situation while her husband was in Chicago helping victims, and she started redirecting Wisconsin donations to the Peshtigo area.
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killed at Rosiere, nearly as many at Forestville, and sixty-two families were burned out at Red River. Then, according to one report, at Brussels “the people perished from suffocation before the flames reached them, so dense was the smoke.” Thirty-six bodies were found and buried at Brussels. Further on the fiery onslaught was especially savage at Williamsonville. There, on the rim of Green Bay, where the Williamson brothers operated a shingle mill, seventy-six people lived, and when the fire swept toward them, many took refuge in a large potato field south of town. Wrapped in wet blankets, they felt secure there. However, once the fire had passed, only seventeen people remained alive. Thirty-five charred bodies lay in the potato field. That same catastrophic Sunday the fires crept along the west side of Green Bay, striking Peshtigo with diabolical fury. The village, seven miles up the Peshtigo River, had a population of about two thousand inhabitants. It was a classic boomtown at the heart of which the ninety-seven steam-driven saws of William Ogden’s sawmill cut 150,000 board feet of lumber every day. Late in the afternoon a strong wind arose from out of the southwest. It soon subsided to be followed by what Father Pernin described as a “moody and mysterious silence.” In time, however, that eerie quiet was shattered by “a low rumbling noise, like the distant approach of a train,” and then the wind came on with a vengeance. Around ten o’clock, reported Tilton, “great tongues of flame were seen leaping high in the air above the tree tops and rapidly approaching the village.” Wind and fire, feeding one other, transformed themselves into a monstrous firestorm spinning counterclockwise, reaching blast furnace-like temperatures of nearly 2000 degrees, and advanced upon the settlement at more than 110 miles per hour. Trees, barns, homes, sawmills, churches, and human beings spontaneously burst into flames, crumpling into ashes. Peshtigo was surely doomed. Tilton described just how swiftly its death sentence was carried out. “Within half an hour, and some say within ten minutes of the time the first building caught fire, the entire village was in flames. The great sheets of fire curled and rolled over the ground like breakers on a reef.” Those surviving the initial attack fled to the river. “The banks of the river as far as the eye could reach,” observed Father Pernin, “were covered with people standing there, motionless as statues, some with eyes staring upturned toward heaven, and tongues protruded…imagining, as many afterwards acknowledged to me, that the end of the world had arrived and there was nothing for them but silent submission to their fate.” Those who did not perish spent the night submerged in frigid water. Many suffered from terrible burns, some were temporarily blinded by the heat and smoke, most shivered convulsively, and one badly burned Norwegian woman, on reaching the opposite bank, gave birth to a baby and then immediately died. Dawn revealed the desolation. Mill hand James Monahan observed: “Here and there over this great field of ashes lay the
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blackened corpses of the dead and the carcasses of animals. … The smell of burned flesh was so sickening that many of the women, after escaping from the river, fainted.” About a thousand people made it through the night, but all that was left of the town were some brick kilns and the stonewalls of the woodenware factory’s boiler room. While Peshtigo burned, the conflagration swept through the farming area of Sugar Bush, seven miles to the southwest, obliterating most of the 120 homesteads and leaving behind the charred remains of 267 people. Among the dead was Charles Towsley, who had cut his own throat and those of two of his children to escape an agonizing extinction by fire. After that, the fire was split in two by a line of sandy eskers. The main portion went west, sparing Marinette and Menominee the full fury of what had hit Peshtigo. Nevertheless, it completely destroyed the small mill town of Menekaune on the Menominee
River. However, virtually all its inhabitants escaped aboard the schooner Stella. At Marinette, three hundred women and children were carried to safety by the steamship Union. But even ships on Green Bay were not free of danger. The rigging and sails on several schooners caught fire and burning shingles fell from the sky upon the schooner Atlanta, seven miles out from shore. Sparks blew over the Menominee River, igniting fires that sped north to Birch Creek, south of Escanaba. There, around midnight Phineas Eames saw a fireball fly through the darkness, followed by a “tremendous explosion.” Suddenly, he exclaimed, “The heavens seemed one vast wave of fire.” Twenty-two people were burned to death in Birch Creek, including Eames’ wife, son, and baby daughter. They were the last to be taken. The next day it rained. Although the inferno—the worst forest fire in American history—was soon spent, its sur-
vivors remained miserably cold and hungry and in desperate need of relief. Captain Hawley of the Union arrived in Green Bay that evening and dispatched a telegram to Madison. No one in the rest of the state was yet aware of what had happened in Northeast Wisconsin. When the message reached Madison, Governor Lucius Fairchild was in Chicago assisting the victims of the terrible fire that had gutted that city the previous day. Shocked at the news, his 24-yearold wife, Frances, boldly took the initiative to divert relief supplies destined for Chicago to the destitute people in the burnt-over region. In time, the people recovered, and the region arose once more from the ashes. This bird’s-eye view shows Peshtigo as it was shortly before fire destroyed it on the night of October 8, 1871. Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-2209
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