150th ANNIVERSARY
GREAT CHICAGO by Suzanne Hanney
A
Catherine O’Leary went to bed between 8 and 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, she remembered hearing fiddle music from a neighbor’s party. About an hour later, her husband Patrick woke her to say their barn was on fire. s
Daniel Sullivan had been the first to report it. Sullivan, known as “Peg Leg” for his wooden limb, was the O’Leary’s neighbor across DeKoven Street. He had left the party early, had seen the fire, had gone inside to try to save some of the O’Leary cows, and had told Patrick. During a nine-day Board of Police and Fire Commissioners inquiry into the Great Chicago Fire that began 150 years ago this week on the O’Leary property, however, Catherine recalled that a neighbor had told her about a man milking cows in her barn just before the fire started, Karen Abbott wrote in “What or Who Caused the Great Chicago Fire?” for Smithsonian Magazine.
industrial district filled with lumberyards, wooden warehouses and coal heaps. As warm air rose, it picked up fuel that became burning embers, or “firebrands,” that started new fires wherever they landed. “It seemed as if the ground itself had ignited, which in fact it may well have, considering the streets, sidewalks and bridges were made of wood,” according to the Fire Department account. The Fire jumped the South Branch of the Chicago River at midnight and shortly afterward consumed the tar works south of Adams Street, according to “History of the Great Chicago Fire: October 8, 9 and 10, 1871,” by James Goodsell (J.H & C.M.
But Mrs. O’Leary literally “took the heat,” after neighborhood children said she had been milking a cow that kicked over a lantern. A local newspaper repeated the story in an early example of “fake news.” The fire inquiry, however, was inconclusive: “Whether it originated from a spark blown by a chimney on that windy night, or was set on fire by human agency, we are unable to determine.” All that is known for certain is that the Great Fire started at about 9:45 p.m. on the O’Leary property, at what is now the site of the Chicago Fire Academy, 558 W. DeKoven St. When it was over on October 10, the “Burnt District” was three-quarters of a mile wide and four miles long, extending to the city limits at Fullerton. Across 2,000 acres, 17,500 buildings were destroyed, 1 in 3 of the city’s 300,000 residents became homeless and 300 were dead. Damage was estimated at $200 million in 1871 dollars, one-third the city’s total valuation. From July to October 1871, Chicago had been in a drought, with only one-quarter the usual amount of rain. In the week before the Fire, there had been 20 fires in a city built largely of wood. The night before, a large fire had left firemen exhausted and equipment depleted, according to the Chicago Fire Department website. Driven by a 20-m.p.h. wind from the southwest, the Great Fire swept north and east of the O’Leary barn, toward an
Goodsell, 1871). ”Faster than a man could walk, the flames leaped from house to house” until they reached Wells Street. The whole area in between was known as Conley’s Patch, an Irish shantytown filled with small wooden structures; it was destroyed in just a few minutes, accounting for most of the Fire’s victims, according to Karen Sawislak in Alt-J “Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-74” (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
