The Fires of October 8, 1871

A recent short Chicago Tribune article on devastating wildfires noted the multiple Midwest fires that occurred on the same 1871 day as the Great Chicago Fire. Herein is a discussion of the fires that day and another 10 years later that was enormously destructive.

The Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871. We Chicago Architecture Center docents talk about it in many of our tours, never mind at parties and, possibly, randomly on the L. In discussing it we mention the extreme drought of the months leading up to the fire.

Chicago was not alone in lacking rain. It was a problem for much of the Midwest throughout the summer and fall of 1871. We know that Chicago’s fire had plenty of fuel from the wooden interiors of its buildings and from its wood-paved sidewalks and streets. At the same time wooden buildings in profusion butted up against one another. It was almost a fire waiting to happen. All that was needed for a major conflagration was a strong, persistent wind. That night the wind kicked up and did not relent for a long time, pushing the deadly fire ahead of it. It didn’t help that fire companies were already exhausted, having fought another big fire before Mrs. O’Leary’s barn went up.

What many of us might not know is that huge, even more deadly fires occurred the same day and night in Wisconsin and Michigan. Conditions in Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, MI and in a large swath of land from Green Bay, Wisconsin to well north of Marinette, Michigan made those areas ripe for fire. Logging practices in these very wooded locations were, to say the least, sloppy.

Loggers of the time were in a great hurry to move on from one cutting area to the next and made no effort to clean up brush, branches and trees they didn’t want – all excellent material for burning.

The deadly fire that started around Green Bay claimed between 1,200 and 1,500 lives. It is called the “Peshtigo fire” because that town had the greatest loss of life, numbering, possibly, over 1,000. It spread from Green Bay 60 miles north, as well as east into Door and Kewaunee counties and west to the Oconto River, covering an area “twice the size of the state of Rhode Island.”

At its farthest northern reach, it crossed the Menominee River and continued into Michigan, ending in about the middle of what is now the Escanaba State Forest. Peshtigo lies about in the middle of this area.

The entire region had been plagued with small forest fires started by sparks from passing trains and the like, but these fires were extinguished. When late in the day on October 8 a sudden cold front moved in, it brought gale-force sustained winds that turned small fires into major infernos, complete with fire-storm conditions in some places, particularly in Peshtigo. This weather was probably the source of the wind in Chicago that night as well.

The fire conditions in Peshtigo itself were horrifying. According to one account of the fire, “Survivors later told of jumping into rivers to escape the flames, and witnessing firestorms, or ‘tornadoes of fire,’ that devastated enormous areas. Many of those who sought shelter in the Peshtigo River literally boiled to death.” This vast disaster remains the deadliest forest fire in U.S. history.

Holland, MI was founded in 1847 by Dutch religious refugees, Calvinist separatists. By 1871 it was a collection point for agricultural commodities in the region, sporting rail lines and a lovely harbor. Prior to October 8, several small fires had been controlled in Holland, but “cut timber and brush . . . lay in the woods surrounding the town. The old river bed and ravine along Thirteenth Street behind the Third Reformed Church was filled with such debris. The situation became critical on Sunday afternoon, October 8, when a southwesterly wind began to build up in intensity. The townspeople turned out en masse to fight fires that were flaring up on the southern and southwestern part of the town even though that first alarm sounded during the time of the afternoon church services. Disaster was upon the town with the development of ‘hurricane’ winds in the evening. Any thought of saving the town was forgotten when two major structures on the west side caught fire. Within the space of two hours the fire took its toll. ‘The entire territory covered by the fire was mowed as clean as with a reaper; there was not a fencepost or a sidewalk plank and hardly the stump of a shade tree left to designate the old lines,’ said one resident.”

I was told by a docent at the town’s museum that after the Holland fire, some people theorized that the fire was started by sparks that crossed Lake Michigan from the Chicago fire. We agreed that this was well beyond a likelihood, about the same possibility as that of blaming a passing comet, another theory ginned up to explain all the Midwest fires.

The fires in Manistee and Port Huron had similar causes: lumbering debris left behind after logging operations, along with the area-wide weather conditions. As one source points out, “The [Michigan] blazes spanned the entire state, affecting both the western towns of Manistee and Holland as well as Port Huron on the state’s eastern region, popularly known as ‘The Thumb.’ These fires might seem less devastating than the maelstrom that had engulfed Peshtigo – they each killed ‘only’ 50 to 100 people – but they still [were] their own particular brand of hell on Earth.”

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there for Michigan. One month short of ten years later, the great Thumb Fire occurred.
The fire destroyed a major part of Tuscola, Huron, Sanilac, and St. Clair counties. It consumed 1,531 houses and 1,480 barns and outbuildings, and left 14,448 homeless. Like the 1871 fire, the fire of 1881 came at the end of an extremely severe drought and was the result of hundreds of land-clearing fires whipped into a cauldron of flame by high winds. In the Saginaw Valley and the Thumb region it burned over much the same territory that had been burned by the 1871 fire. That decade-prior fire had been so strong that winds associated with it had blown over trees, and many of these were still laying around, dry. In addition, the 1871 fire did not consume all the slash left by the logging operations of the previous decades, so much was left to burn. No one is sure just how or just where in Tuscola County the fire started. It was the time of year when people burned brush piles and other debris left by lumbermen and those engaged in clearing the land. Many people think the wind may have whipped a brushpile fire out of control. The fire probably started when a series of small slash fires coalesced into a wall of flame moving to the northeast, a beast of fire that crossed a countryside full of old fuel. An appalling aspect of the loss of life in this fire was the large number of children who died when whole families were wiped out.

Today, forest management, done properly and regularly, helps to keep such devastating fires from spreading. Some areas, particularly in the west, greatly benefit if they can have planned controlled burns that emulate conditions prior to settlement. However, public sentiment, particularly in areas where homes and other buildings are located, makes such burns difficult to impossible. In addition, the historic mechanism of natural wildfires that actually improve forests and open lands only began to be understood in the 1960s. Prior forest management put its emphasis on fighting such fires, keeping the dead wood and brush from being consumed and providing fodder for new growth. Despite our knowledge of the working of forests, prolonged drought, high winds and a single spark can still cause enormously destructive fires in our time, as we have seen in California and other states.

City fires like the Great Chicago Fire and similar nineteenth century conflagrations in New York, Boston and other cities no longer commonly occur. In 1973 a part of the City of Chelsea, Massachusetts – 18 acres and over 300 primarily wooden homes – burned, fanned by high winds (ironically, a fire in a city space only a few hundred yards away from the border of a much large 1908 Chelsea fire). We’re more likely to see city and suburban fires caused by gas explosions, an extreme form of which occurred in northern Massachusetts recently; or by horrible accidents such as occurred in 2013 in Lac-Mégantic, Québec when an unattended freight train carrying crude oil rolled down a grade and derailed in the middle of the town. Many of the tank cars exploded and the center of the town was obliterated.

The fame of the Great Chicago Fire is widespread (as is the myth about Mrs. O’Leary’s blameless cow). City events such as that fire fascinate many. But equally devastating fires in places like Peshtigo and Manistee bring to mind the question: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to witness it, does it make a sound? The other great fires of October 8, 1871 barely made a sound that the public heard and today whatever sound they made is hardly an echo. Let this little essay be the receiver that amplifies that sound, that faint echo.

A shorter version of this essay was published on Chicago Architecture Center’s Volunteer website in 2018.

The main sources for this article are as follows:

MAJOR POST-LOGGING FIRES IN MICHIGAN: the 1800’s (http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/fires.html)

Alasdair Wilkins, “October 8, 1871: The Night America Burned,” March 29, 2012 (https://io9.gizmodo.com/5897629/october-8-1871-the-night-america-burned)

© Edmund J. McDevitt
January, 2019