The Great Calamity of the Age
September 22, 2021 8:10 AM Subscribe
An oral history of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, compiled from eyewitness accounts by Robert Loerzel.
What a harrowing read.
posted by saladin at 10:27 AM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by saladin at 10:27 AM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
Oh, man. "During an 1871 inquiry, the city’s Police and Fire Commission heard no testimony from anyone who’d been seen entering the barn, but that investigation was far from thorough. Daniel Sullivan, a 26-year-old Irish immigrant with a wooden leg, testified that he saw a fire in the barn around 9:20 or 9:25 p.m., when he was sitting on the other side of DeKoven Street." Sullivan then raises the alarm, tries to empty the barn, slips and falls, is menaced by fire and livestock, and barely makes it out alive. Sully! But, by the close: The 1871 fire gave Chicago its most enduring myth. Over and over, people told the story of how Mrs. O’Leary was milking her cow when it kicked over a lantern and set the city ablaze. But witnesses at the Police and Fire Commission had agreed that the O’Leary family was in bed when the fire began. In 1997, the Chicago City Council declared that city officials "do hereby forever exonerate Mrs. O’Leary and her cow from all blame in regard to the Great Chicago Fire."
That resolution was prompted by the research of Richard F. Bales, who later wrote The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow. After analyzing property records and testimony, Bales pointed to the O’Learys’ neighbor Daniel Sullivan as a possible culprit. According to Bales, at least one building would have blocked Sullivan’s view of the O’Leary barn if he’d been sitting at the spot where he claimed he was when he saw the fire. Bales conjectured that Sullivan must have lied to cover up his own role in starting the fire, perhaps by smoking in the O’Leary barn. Sully!!
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:53 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
That resolution was prompted by the research of Richard F. Bales, who later wrote The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow. After analyzing property records and testimony, Bales pointed to the O’Learys’ neighbor Daniel Sullivan as a possible culprit. According to Bales, at least one building would have blocked Sullivan’s view of the O’Leary barn if he’d been sitting at the spot where he claimed he was when he saw the fire. Bales conjectured that Sullivan must have lied to cover up his own role in starting the fire, perhaps by smoking in the O’Leary barn. Sully!!
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:53 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
God.
In this chaos were hundreds of children, wailing and crying for their parents. One little girl I saw, whose golden hair was afire. She ran screaming past me, and somebody threw a glass of liquor upon her, which flared up and covered her with a blue flame.
posted by El Curioso at 1:08 PM on September 22, 2021
In this chaos were hundreds of children, wailing and crying for their parents. One little girl I saw, whose golden hair was afire. She ran screaming past me, and somebody threw a glass of liquor upon her, which flared up and covered her with a blue flame.
posted by El Curioso at 1:08 PM on September 22, 2021
This is absolutely gripping.
I wrote (but never finished or published) an academic paper that detailed the national conversation around the arrest, trial and incarceration/execution of the Haymarket Affair defendants - the best source for public commentary at the time of the trial was, interestingly, published Sunday sermons from pulpits in Chicago and elsewhere. At the height of the gilded age Sunday preaching was more akin to a secular lecture format that provided commentary on major news events. The "third" Great Awakening didn't materially impact the established churches and so they served, more or less, as signifiers of class and status. Working people naturally didn't attend worship because they couldn't, the weekend wouldn't be invented for another fifty years.
The churches and the discourse therein serves as a phenomenal barometer for the disposition of the capitalist class and Chicago was really the center of the preaching arts of the age.
I should root around in my office and find those materials - it might be of interest to the folks who published this fascinating work.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 1:44 PM on September 22, 2021 [8 favorites]
I wrote (but never finished or published) an academic paper that detailed the national conversation around the arrest, trial and incarceration/execution of the Haymarket Affair defendants - the best source for public commentary at the time of the trial was, interestingly, published Sunday sermons from pulpits in Chicago and elsewhere. At the height of the gilded age Sunday preaching was more akin to a secular lecture format that provided commentary on major news events. The "third" Great Awakening didn't materially impact the established churches and so they served, more or less, as signifiers of class and status. Working people naturally didn't attend worship because they couldn't, the weekend wouldn't be invented for another fifty years.
The churches and the discourse therein serves as a phenomenal barometer for the disposition of the capitalist class and Chicago was really the center of the preaching arts of the age.
I should root around in my office and find those materials - it might be of interest to the folks who published this fascinating work.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 1:44 PM on September 22, 2021 [8 favorites]
Chicago's PBS station WTTW has an hour long show about it, should be viewable here.
posted by dnash at 2:23 PM on September 22, 2021
posted by dnash at 2:23 PM on September 22, 2021
Out of curiosity I looked up the area of the O'Leary house, appropriately enough it is a Chicago Fire Academy.
I grew up in suburban Chicago we all heard stories of the fire, but this puts it a much more tangible form.
posted by Badgermann at 1:19 PM on September 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
I grew up in suburban Chicago we all heard stories of the fire, but this puts it a much more tangible form.
posted by Badgermann at 1:19 PM on September 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
As mentioned in the article's epilogue, this is also the 150th anniversary of the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin, which happened on the same day the Great Chicago Fire (along with several other giant fires in the Midwest, which lead to some believing they were all caused by Biela's Comet.)
The Peshtigo Fire Museum is very interesting and worth a stop if you're passing through. It is adjacent the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery, where over 300 unidentified victims are interred in a mass grave. There are plaques next to the few marked graves that detail stories about the fire. This one next to the Laurance family's grave marker has stuck with me for years:
"There were several strange phenomena that accompanied this fire; one was the large black objects resembling balloons which revolved with great rapidity, advancing along the periphery of the fire. When these objects struck a tree or a house, they would burst with a loud report and fire would stream out in all directions.
Mr. Laurance had one of the finest farms in the Lower Sugar Bush, and as the fire approached, he took his wife and three children into the center of a large field. An eyewitness tells of seeing them huddled together there when one of these balloon-like objects landed in their midst, bursting into flame and wiping out the entire family."
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 1:50 PM on September 23, 2021 [3 favorites]
The Peshtigo Fire Museum is very interesting and worth a stop if you're passing through. It is adjacent the Peshtigo Fire Cemetery, where over 300 unidentified victims are interred in a mass grave. There are plaques next to the few marked graves that detail stories about the fire. This one next to the Laurance family's grave marker has stuck with me for years:
"There were several strange phenomena that accompanied this fire; one was the large black objects resembling balloons which revolved with great rapidity, advancing along the periphery of the fire. When these objects struck a tree or a house, they would burst with a loud report and fire would stream out in all directions.
Mr. Laurance had one of the finest farms in the Lower Sugar Bush, and as the fire approached, he took his wife and three children into the center of a large field. An eyewitness tells of seeing them huddled together there when one of these balloon-like objects landed in their midst, bursting into flame and wiping out the entire family."
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 1:50 PM on September 23, 2021 [3 favorites]
Hey Dean Yeager! - you just sent me down a deep rabbit hole. Wild.
And the plaque titled "Mellen" from the fire cemetery has me in literal tears. That is one of the saddest things I've ever read in my life. Impossibly sad, the depth of human despair.
Absolutely haunting.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:06 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
And the plaque titled "Mellen" from the fire cemetery has me in literal tears. That is one of the saddest things I've ever read in my life. Impossibly sad, the depth of human despair.
Absolutely haunting.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:06 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
Horrifying in narrative, but amazing in language, the casual colloquialism and the more poetic:
Above all the sounds of the roaring fire, the wind, and the excited shouts of a moving mass of people, the bell whirled on its frame and over its stanchions, ringing out with a weirdness and a despairing clangorous volume, as though it were possessed of sense and were agonizing in its struggle against destruction.
And I did not expect the supine liquor drinkers.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 5:46 PM on September 26, 2021
Above all the sounds of the roaring fire, the wind, and the excited shouts of a moving mass of people, the bell whirled on its frame and over its stanchions, ringing out with a weirdness and a despairing clangorous volume, as though it were possessed of sense and were agonizing in its struggle against destruction.
And I did not expect the supine liquor drinkers.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 5:46 PM on September 26, 2021
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posted by SA456 at 10:24 AM on September 22, 2021 [5 favorites]