150th Anniversary Great Chicago

As 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.

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.

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.

The Loop Looking West

The C.R. Clark Photograph Book, courtesy of the Newberry Library

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 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. 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 “Smoldering City: Chicagoans Alt-J and the Great Fire, 1871-74” (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

The Loop Looking East

The C.R. Clark Photograph Book, courtesy of the Newberry Library

Next, the fire consumed especially volatile fuel at the South Division municipal gas works at Monroe and Wacker, adjacent to the tar works. There was an explosion, and the city’s streetlamps flickered and died.

As the Fire reached the central business district, it began to display what firefighters call a “convection effect:” rising warm air that mixed with cooler air to propel the Fire on its own, Sawislak wrote. The city’s official weatherman, Thomas Mosher Jr., told how “wind at ground level blew toward the center of the fire from all directions,” creating a counterclockwise column of flame and smoke – a firestorm.

A map shows the spread of the Fire by time and date

Michael P. Conzen, Christopher P. Thale assisting, courtesy of the Newberry Library

James S. Osgood, chief usher of the Crosby Opera House and art gallery on the south side of Washington Street between State and Dearborn, arrived there shortly after the gas works explosion. The opera house had been closed for $80,000 worth of renovations and was scheduled to open the next day. “There was no fire in the neighborhood of the opera house at that time, although the sparks were dangerously thick,” he said a decade later during a civil case in federal court.

Osgood, opera house owner Albert Crosby and another man worked to save the gallery’s collection of Hudson River paintings, a landscape genre popular in the mid-19th century. Large paintings were taken out of their frames and lowered by ropes to the street, smaller ones carried downstairs individually. After finding a wagon and horses, they took the paintings to 226 S. Wabash and then farther south.

The Crosby Opera House, before the Chicago Fire, circa 1860.

The C.R. Clark Photograph Book, courtesy of the Newberry Library

Just before 1:30 a.m., they walked a block west to Clark Street to see the Fire. The Courthouse, on the site of today’s City Hall/County Building between Washington and Randolph, Clark and LaSalle streets, was thought to be fireproof. They watched a flying brand hit the Courthouse cupola.

The Fire moved down Washington Street to Dearborn and consumed the Crosby Opera House soon afterward, taking with it “three piano houses and a number of art treasures, including paintings by some of the leading art masters of the old and new worlds,” according to Goodsell. A wing of the Fire moved north along LaSalle, Wells and Franklin toward the main branch of the Chicago River, wiping out grain elevators, banks and three large hotels, as well as the retail structures on both Lake and Randolph streets: hide and leather houses, hardware and farm implement dealers and toy shops.

Another branch of the Fire moved south along State Street, destroying Field and Leiter’s store at Washington Street (the site of the present Macy’s). At State and Madison streets, the St. James Hotel burned down, along with Booksellers Row, on the east side of the street (site of the present-day Target). Open just 13 days, the eight-story Palmer House at Monroe and State also burned. Ultimately, the entire business district was obliterated, except for an unfinished building at Monroe and LaSalle streets and the Lind block immediately north of the Randolph Bridge at Wacker.

Meanwhile, a firebrand had jumped the main branch of the Chicago River and continued north, confounding smug North Siders, who went to sleep thinking the river would save them. At 3:30 a.m. Monday morning, another firebrand landed on the wooden roof of the city’s only water pumping station at Chicago avenue and Pine street. The exposed machinery was rendered useless, which ruined remaining firefighting efforts.

The main stem of the Fire crossed the main branch of the Chicago River onto the North Side around 5:40 a.m. Monday and continued moving north between State and Rush streets. Between Kinzie and Illinois streets, east of the Chicago River’s North Branch, nearly everything burned, including the McCormick Reaper Factory, east of Rush Street. Rich and poor alike met on the Sands, east of State Street and north of the river; or on the lakefront beaches. Some plunged into the water up to their heads, but their hair was nevertheless singed off – if they came up for air at all.

West of LaSalle Street, the densely populated (two and three families in a building) German and Scandinavian neighborhood south of Chicago Avenue burned, along with the Irish one from Chicago to North avenues. So did Old Settlers’ mansions east of Clark Street – except for that of Mahlon Ogden, brother of the city’s first mayor.

By noon Monday, the Fire reached North Avenue, home to German truck farmers and semi-skilled labor such as shoemakers, brewers and wood joiners. Only the walls of St. Michael’s Church at what is now Eugenie and Clevelandremained standing. Policeman Richard Bellinger saved his home at 2121 N. Hudson by tearing up the wooden sidewalk and fence that surrounded it, then wetting it down with water – and cider. The Fire continued to the northern city limits at Fullerton, where there was nothing left to burn. An early morning rain Tuesday extinguished it.

A makeshift coffee house is set up amidst the rubble from the Chicago Fire.

The C.R. Clark Photograph Book, courtesy of the Newberry Library

Through the Flames and Beyond: Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire

On Friday, October 8, from 6:30- 7:30 p.m., the Newberry Library, 60 E. Walton St., will host a free public event on its front steps to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. The familyfriendly program will have a 19thcentury-style magic lantern show of animation accompanied by narration, music, and period costumes.

After roaring out of Mrs. O’Leary’s barn and consuming everything in its path, the Great Chicago Fire surged toward the home of Mahlon D. Ogden, brother of Chicago’s first mayor. Ogden’s home stood on the site of what is now the Newberry. Made of wood, it seemed destined for oblivion.

Yet against all odds, the home emerged relatively unscathed after the greatest disaster in the history of Chicago.

How did this happen? And what can we learn from those who survived the Chicago Fire as we confront catastrophic events today?

The event is produced in partnership with the Hideout, with magic lantern slides by Kathleen Judge and music directed by Jeffery Thomas. The outdoor, in-person event will take place on Walton Street in front of the Newberry. Seating will be placed to accommodate social distancing and available first come, first served. You are welcome to bring your own chairs, but no food and beverages.

In accordance with City of Chicago guidelines, masking remains encouraged. In the event of rain, the event will move indoors, where masking is required.

The Chicago Fire Brings Social Inequities to Light

Chicago’s business community began rebuilding immediately after the Great Fire of 1871, but 100,000 people were left homeless, and recovery exposed deep inequities in the city, similar to those of today.

Although the Fire destroyed nearly all buildings in the downtown business district, Chicago still retained infrastructure such as the new, South Side stockyards that processed more meat than anywhere else on Earth; many of the wharves, lumberyards and mills along the Chicago River; 2 out of 3 grain elevators; railroad tracks that linked the city with both coasts; and most of all, its position as a trading and financial center.

New architectural styles were later developed as the downtown was rebuilt according to new building codes that required fireproof materials such as brick, limestone or marble. But these materials were unaffordable to the immigrant community, most of whom had lived in wooden buildings, so they were ultimately forced to relocate away from the city center. Irish residents moved closer to the stockyards, Swedish to Andersonville, which was still farmland, and elsewhere.

There was also resentment against the immigrant Irish O’Leary family, in whose barn the Fire started 150 years ago October 8. From what is now roughly Roosevelt Road and Halsted Street, the Fire spread north and east to what was then the city limits at Fullerton. Before it died out early October 10, it destroyed over 17,500 buildings and killed 300 people.

A nine-day Police and Fire Department inquiry into the cause of the Fire was inconclusive as to whether it was caused by a spark from a chimney or set by a human. Mrs. O’Leary testified that she had been asleep when it started, but that she had been told by a neighbor that someone had been in her barn milking the cows. She was also exonerated by the Chicago City Council in 1997.

“Fake news” or not, the urban legend that has persisted was that Mrs. O’Leary had been in her barn milking a cow when it kicked over a lantern that started the Fire. The story played on ethnic stereotypes and “nativist fears about the city’s growing immigrant population,” Karen Abbott wrote in “What (or Who) Caused the Great Chicago Fire” for Smithsonian Magazine. The Chicago Times called the 44-year-old Catherine O’Leary “an old Irish woman…an old hag” who deliberately set the Fire in revenge against the city for denying her a bit of bacon or wood.

"The Cause of the Great Chicago Fire Oct. 9th, 1871" propaganda artwork that places the blame for the Chicago Fire on Catherine O'Leary

Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

Holy Family Church, 1080 W. Roosevelt Road, was the O’Leary family church and it withstood the Fire, it is said, after its pastor, Father Arnold Damen, S.J., prayed all night on his knees to the Virgin Mary. Father Damen promised to keep seven lights burning in her honor if the church was spared – and the lights are still on today. He offered Holy Family Church, its schools and college to the City for refugees of the Fire, but the Chicago Relief and Aid Society chose instead to locate with other city offices at the smaller First Congregational Church across from Union Park.

“Considering the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment that still existed in Chicago, it would have been a leap of faith for the city’s Protestant elite to consider [Damen’s] offer,” Ellen Skerrett wrote in “Setting the Record Straight” for St. Ignatius College Prep. “It was a missed opportunity on many levels.”

The Chicago Relief and Aid Society was entirely privately funded and its officials decided who was “worthy,” unlike federal government disaster relief today, Skerrett noted. However, the Jesuits at Holy Family distributed food and supplies to thousands “without distinction of race or creed.” Orphans were received in the college and the basement was used as a distribution center for provisions and clothing.

Nearby, at the affiliated convent of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, fire victims rang the doorbell all day in search of aid. “Those in authority were almost all Protestants,” who refused to aid poor neighbors on the West Side, one of the sisters reported to their Paris headquarters. The Maxwell Street school and convent run by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (B.V.M) was another source of help. Sr. Agatha Hurley, B.V.M., was so well loved that residents from Dubuque, IA, (where their motherhouse was located), sent $130 and barrels of flour and clothing.

People fleeing over the Randolph Street bridge to the West Side. The large building in the foreground, the Lind Block, actually survived

Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum

The Chicago Relief and Aid Society built four small communities of barracks for homeless poor people: on Madison Street, on Harrison Street, on Clybourn Avenue and in Washington Park, across Walton Street from the mansion of Mahlon Ogden, which survived the Fire. The barracks accommodated 1,000 families, with each allotted two furnished rooms, according to greatchicagofire. org, a website maintained by the Chicago History Museum and Northwestern University.

The Society patronizingly noted in its 1874 report that since the occupants had not lived in their own homes before, but in tenements, they were probably almost as comfortable as before. And, since the houses were less crowded and supervised by health officials and police, “their moral and sanitary condition was unquestionably better than that which had heretofore been obtained in that class.”

A neighbor of the Ogdens, who was also homeless because of the Fire, hired one of the Washington Park barracks residents for a day’s labor. She later wrote that he joked with her about his few, but “‘very select neighbors.’” The Ogdens, on the other hand, “live in fear of their lives, with their house watched day & night by policemen,” she wrote.

The Mahlon D. Ogden residence, which survived the Chicago Fire

The C.R. Clark Photograph Book, courtesy of the Newberry Library

The relief society also built over 5,200 cottages for skilled workers: 12-feet by 16-feet for families of three, 20 by 16 for bigger families. The North Side had 75,000 of the 100,000 homeless: Americanborn who came to Chicago in the 1830s and 40s east of Clark Street, immigrants west of LaSalle. Coming from oppression, Irish comprised 50 percent of those on public assistance in 1870, but 13.4 percent of the population. Germans were 20 percent of those on assistance, but 17 percent of the city’s inhabitants. Over half the Irish held unskilled jobs, one-third the German.

Given the loss of their homes and often their jobs, immigrants found the new fire codes requiring the use of more expensive brick or stone a barrier to rebuilding. In addition, as Karen Sawislak noted in ”Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-74” (University of Chicago Press, 1996), immigrants regarded the building codes as restrictions imposed by nativists to prevent them from reviving their ethnic enclaves. They even violently disrupted a January 1872 Chicago City Council meeting.

The next month, the City Council passed a watered-down fire protection ordinance that led to the concept of the “Gold Coast and the Slum,” according to Lawrence J. Vale in “Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities,” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) excerpted for Chicago History magazine in fall 2014. Better, fireproof materials were required east of Clark Street, but cheaper construction was allowed west of Clark Street.

Because much of this land east of the Chicago River and north of Chicago Avenue was empty, relief cottages were built there. By 1873, police had nicknamed the neighborhood “Little Hell,” because of the regular knifings and disturbances. Occupied by Irish, Swedes, Germans, Dutch, Poles, Italians and a few American-born at the time, the neighborhood changed names as it changed ethnicities. It would later be known as Little Sicily – and then Cabrini Green.

'City on Fire': Chicago 1871

The devastating grief and subsequent growth sparked by the destruction of the Chicago Fire is the subject of “City on Fire: Chicago 1871,” opening at the Chicago History Museum on Friday, October 8 -- which is 150 years to the day since the Fire began.

“The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was a pivotal event in the city’s history, setting it on a path of unmatched resilience and constant evolution that still defines Chicago today,” said Julius L. Jones, lead curator for the exhibition. “We are honored to tell this important Chicago story in a way that helps visitors draw parallels to the present day.”

Designed to be family-friendly, the exhibit will immerse visitors in the destruction of the Fire and the decisions people made as they fled danger. The exhibit features more than 100 pieces from the museum’s collection, interactive media and personal stories from the O’Leary and Hudlin families and other survivors. A largescale reproduction of a cyclorama painting depicting the breadth of the fire’s path across the city is the pinnacle of the exhibition. The original was a main attraction during the 1893 World’s Fair, standing nearly 50 feet high and 400 feet long, in its own building on Michigan Avenue.

“While the devastation of the Great Chicago Fire was felt by all in the city, the rebuilding efforts exposed inequities,” said Donald Lassere, president and CEO of the Chicago History Museum. “We are honored to facilitate this important discussion and welcome visitors to learn more about this monumental event in our city’s history.”

More information is available at www.chicago1871.org

By Suzanne Hanney