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By Ed McDevitt, Class of 2010

The Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871. We talk about it on several of our tours, never mind at parties, and, possibly, randomly while on the L. In discussing it I’m sure most of us mention the extreme drought of the months leading up to the fire.

But 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. All that was needed for a major conflagration was a strong, persistent wind. That night, the wind kicked up and persisted for a long time, pushing the deadly fire ahead of it.

What many of us might not know is that huge, even more deadly fires occurred that same day and night in Wisconsin and Michigan. Conditions in Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, MI and in a large swath of land around Peshtigo, WI, north of Green Bay, made those areas also ripe for fire. Logging practices in those very wooded locations were, to say the least, sloppy. Loggers were in a great hurry to move on from one cutting area to the next and made no effort to clean up the brush, branches, and trees they didn’t want – all excellent material for fuel.

The fire in Wisconsin 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 started, however, just north of Green Bay and spread 60 miles north, 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 center 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, but these fires were controllable. Late in the day, a sudden cold front moved in and 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 disaster remains the deadliest forest fire in U.S. history. (1)

Dutch religious refugees, Calvinist separatists, founded Holland, Michigan in 1847. 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.” (1)

A docent at the town’s museum told me 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.” (2)

The Great Thumb Fire

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 fire had been so strong that winds associated with it had blown over trees, and many of these were still laying around, dry. Also, 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 as a series of small blazes in slash fires coalesced into a wall of flame moving to the northeast. Its severity is accounted for not only by the drought and high winds that prevailed, but by the fact that the country was full of slash from logging and land clearing, and of dead and down timber killed, but unconsumed, by the fire of 1871. The appalling thing about this loss of life was the large number of children involved due to whole families being wiped out.(1)

Today, forest management, done properly and regularly, militates against such devastating fires. Even in California, ravaged as it has been by wildfires, what has occurred has, according to experts, little to do with forest management. Rather, ordinarily green areas, subjected to prolonged drought, become dry and highly flammable. The combination of such dryness, geography and high winds (to say nothing of the fine fuel provided by houses and other buildings) subjects the area to ever more frequent large fires. At the same time, fire codes in our cities and the use of fireproof materials in those cities give us the sense that we’re not going to experience another “Great Chicago/New York/Boston Fire.” But as those California fires show, municipalities of wooden homes can easily be fuel for great fires, and actually have been.

Primary Sources:

1. MAJOR POST-LOGGING FIRES IN MICHIGAN: the 1800’s (http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/fires.html)Alasdair
2. Wilkins, “October 8, 1871: The Night America Burned,” March 29, 2012 (https://io9.gizmodo.com/5897629/october-8-1871-the-night-america-burned)