The Great Chicago Fire

Late one night, when we were all in bed,
Old Mother Leary left a lantern in the shed;
And when the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said,
"There'll be a hot time in the old town, tonight."

That old song pins the whole thing on Mrs. O'Leary's cow, and almost none of it is true. What is true is that on the night of Sunday, October 8, 1871, a fire started in or near the O'Learys' barn on DeKoven Street, southwest of downtown. By the time rain helped put it out, late on Monday and into Tuesday, October 10, it had burned a strip of the city about four miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide, more than 2,000 acres, or about 3.3 square miles. Around 300 people died, and something like 90,000 to 100,000 of the city's roughly 324,000 residents lost their homes (Wikipedia).

In today's terms, the fire took out the Loop, what's now the Magnificent Mile, River North, the Gold Coast, Old Town and a good part of Lincoln Park, reaching as far north as Fullerton Avenue. For how it fits into the rest of the city's story, see our brief history of Chicago.

Why it spread

Chicago in 1871 was a wooden city. More than two-thirds of its buildings were made entirely of wood, many with tar or shingle roofs, and the sidewalks and a lot of the streets were wood too. The city had had only about an inch of rain between July 4 and October 9, and a strong wind was blowing from the southwest. The fire department had 185 firefighters and 17 horse-drawn steam pumpers for the whole city, and they were worn out from a week of fires, including a big one the day before.

Then things went wrong. A watchman's mistake sent the first engines to the wrong place, and an alarm from near the barn never registered at the courthouse, where the watchmen were posted. By the time firefighters reached DeKoven Street, the fire had spread to the neighbors' buildings. They hoped the South Branch of the Chicago River would stop it. It didn't. The riverbanks were lined with lumber yards, coal yards and wooden barges, and around midnight burning debris blew across the water and set the South Side Gas Works alight.

From there it ran through the business district. At about 2:30am on October 9, the cupola of the courthouse collapsed and its great bell crashed down, loud enough that some said they heard it a mile away. Fire whirls, spinning columns of superheated air, carried flaming debris across the main branch of the river into the North Side. When a burning timber landed on the roof of the city's waterworks, the building went up within minutes, the water mains went dry, and after that there was little anyone could do. By noon on Monday the fire had reached North Avenue, and it kept going almost another mile to Fullerton (Chicago History Museum). Rain began late that evening, by which point the fire was already running out of things to burn.

What was lost

For days, the ruins were too hot to survey. When the city finally counted, the list ran to more than 73 miles of roads, 120 miles of sidewalk, 2,000 lampposts, about 17,500 buildings and $222 million in property, around a third of the whole city's value. Only about 120 bodies were ever recovered. The coroner said an exact toll was impossible.

The Chicago Historical Society lost most of its collection, including Abraham Lincoln's final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Potter Palmer's Palmer House hotel, barely a year old, burned too, and so did the bigger hotel he had started building two weeks earlier.

Chicago wasn't the only place burning. The same hot, dry, windy night, the Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin killed somewhere between 1,200 and 2,500 people, which makes it the deadliest fire in American history, and fires also swept through Holland and Manistee in Michigan. Peshtigo got little attention at first, partly because the telegraph lines to Green Bay were among the first things to burn.

So who started it?

Nobody knows, and city officials never determined the cause. The cow story was going around before the flames were out, and it was in the Tribune's first post-fire issue. Catherine O'Leary, a poor Irish Catholic immigrant, made an easy scapegoat at a time when anti-Irish feeling in the city ran high. The O'Learys said they were in bed when the fire began. Their cottage, in front of the barn, survived, because the wind pushed the flames north and east, away from it. Decades later, reporter Michael Ahern, who had worked for the Chicago Republican in 1871, admitted that he and two colleagues had made the cow up, though another reporter later said he had ghost-written the story under Ahern's byline. Catherine O'Leary died in Chicago in 1895. In 1997, the City Council formally cleared her, and the cow.

Other suspects have come and gone.

• Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan. The neighbor who first reported the fire. Researcher Richard Bales argued that Sullivan started it himself, perhaps by accident while in the barn, and his work helped persuade the council to clear Mrs. O'Leary. Not every historian buys it, and the Chicago Public Library has criticized his account.
• The party next door. The O'Learys rented the front of their cottage to a family named McLaughlin, who were throwing a party that night. One version has a guest wandering out to the barn for milk.
• A craps game. In articles for the Chicago Tribune in 1997 and 1998, reporter Anthony DeBartolo dug up a claim by Louis M. Cohn, a businessman who died in 1942 and left $35,000 to Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. The dedication of that gift included Cohn's story that as a teenager he was shooting dice in the O'Learys' barn with one of their sons when the group knocked over a lantern while fleeing Mrs. O'Leary. Cohn said he stopped to scoop up the money first.
• A comet. Because several big fires broke out around Lake Michigan the same day, a few writers have blamed fragments of Biela's Comet. Scientists don't take this seriously. Meteorites are cold when they land and don't start fires.

The most likely explanation is the least exciting one. After a drought summer, with a strong wind and a city built of kindling, it didn't take much.

The rebuild

Help poured in. New York City sent $450,000, St. Louis $300,000, and money came from as far off as London and Greenock in Scotland. On October 11, the mayor handed control of order in the city to General Philip Sheridan, whose troops patrolled for two weeks. The first load of lumber for rebuilding arrived the day the last building was put out. The lumber town of Singapore, Michigan, sent so much wood that the land around it turned to dunes, which buried the town, and it had to be abandoned.

Some good came out of it. A British campaign to send books to Chicago led the City Council to create the free Chicago Public Library in 1872, starting with more than 8,000 donated volumes. The city rewrote its fire codes, and builders moved to brick, stone and eventually steel. Potter Palmer rebuilt his hotel across the street from the original and called it "The World's First Fireproof Building." Twenty-two years after the fire, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition. The fire is also one of the four stars on the Chicago flag.

Where to see the fire today

The Chicago Water Tower, 806 N. Michigan Ave. This is the one everyone knows, and the obvious stop on a Magnificent Mile walk. The 182.5-foot tower, designed by William W. Boyington in 1869 and built of yellowish Lemont limestone, was the only public building in the burned district to survive. Oscar Wilde called it "a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it." The city has used the inside as a small gallery for local photographers and artists, the City Gallery, so check the city's listings for hours, or just enjoy it from outside (Wikipedia). The little park around it is Jane M. Byrne Plaza.

The Chicago Avenue Pumping Station, across Michigan Avenue. It was gutted when its roof caught fire, and the pumps that should have fed the firefighters stopped. The stone walls survived, and the building was rebuilt inside them.

The O'Leary site, 558 W. DeKoven St., near Little Italy. The remaining buildings on the O'Leary lot were torn down in 1956, and the Chicago Fire Department's training academy went up on the site, opening in 1961. Out front stands Egon Weiner's bronze Pillar of Fire, a stylized flame on the spot where the fire is said to have started (Choose Chicago). It's a city facility rather than a visitor attraction, so look from the sidewalk.

The Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St., at the south end of Lincoln Park. The museum's 1930s dioramas, built by German artisans, include a scene of the fire, and they've been on display longer than anything else in the building. It's open Tuesday to Saturday from 9:30am to 4:30pm and Sunday from noon to 5pm. Adult admission is $24, or $19 for Chicago residents, and Illinois residents get in free on set days through the year (visit page). Before you go, spend some time with the museum's online exhibition, The Great Chicago Fire & the Web of Memory, which includes self-guided tours of 54 fire-related sites around the city. More museums are on our museums in Chicago page.

St. Michael's Church, in Old Town. Like the pumping station, it was gutted, and the parish rebuilt it inside the surviving walls.

St. James Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral on the Near North Side. Its bell tower survived and was worked into the rebuilt church, and the stones near the top are still blackened with soot.

Old St. Patrick's Church, in the West Loop. The fire never reached it, and it's the oldest church building still standing in the city.

A few houses in Lincoln Park. Police constable Bellinger's cottage at 2121 N. Hudson Ave. and the houses at 2339 and 2343 N. Cleveland Ave. made it through as well. They're private homes, so be polite about it.

Photo by Marcin Wichary