On October 8, 1871, Catherine O'Leary was finishing things up for the day, and then she went to bed. When she woke up the next morning, she had done nothing less than change the world. At around 9 PM the prior evening, a cow belonging to O'Leary allegedly knocked over a lamp, which in turn set some of the hay in the barn aflame,which in turn set the entire barn ablaze, which on turn spread to other places, and which in turn set the whole city on fire. Whatever the actual cause of the fire, the Fire Department first was made aware of the blaze at around 9:40. At that point, the sense of urgency was lacking, as there had already been a large blaze earlier in the week, and the firemen were tired.
Eventually, the gravity of the situation was realized, but by that point, the fire had grown very large. So large, in fact, that when it reached a tall church on the south end of the river, it literally jumped the banks and continued burning on the other side of the river. This was also right about the time when the fire started to encroach upon downtown. The first Holy Name Cathedral burned to the ground. The first Palmer House(which had just opened its doors 13 days earlier) burned to the ground. The original terminal for the Chicago & Milwaukee railroad burned to the ground. The offices of the South Park Commission burned to the ground. The very first home field of the Chicago Cubs even burned to the ground.
The first Marshall Field's location was under the gun, and that's when the employees took drastic action. Levi Leiter ordered every single horse in the possession of the company to the store, where the workers started rescuing every piece of inventory they could, and sending them on the horses to Leiter's house(which was out of the path of the conflagration). A young stock clerk even managed to get the store's pumps up and running, allowing use of the steam-powered elevators, as well as the use of fire hoses to wet down the side of the building to combat the advancing flames. When the water works burned, the battle to save Chicago had been lost and everyone knew it. The workers at Marshall Field's worked until the final second, with the last employee escaping the building mere seconds before flames engulfed the structure. The quick thinking of the Field's workers paid off, as the store was able to reopen only four weeks after the fire.
As for the rest of the city, things were rather different. The fire had burned 2,000 acres to the ground, destroyed $222 Million worth of property, and left a third of the city's population homeless. But you want to know what it spared? Among other things, the Water Tower and the Pumping Station. Regardless, the city was resilient, shipping in the first load of lumber to rebuild the very day that the fire finally died out. Potter Palmer secured a loan to rebuild as the ashes of his prized hotel were still smoldering. The city was already on the upswing. And as that reconstruction was going on, the debris had to go somewhere, right? Well, the debris from the fire was dumped into the Lake, creating what we know of today as Grant Park(and as a consequence, land-locking the Illinois Central tracks) By 1893, the city welcomed more than 21 Million people to a fair that would be talked about for decades to come.
But one important factoid remains. Just who caused the fire? Obviously, Mrs. O'Leary's cow didn't do it. The story had been fabricated to placate the anti-Irish sentiment rampant in the city at that time. Some sources point to Daniel Sullivan, who was the first person to report the fire. Allegedly, he set the hay on fire while trying to steal milk. But regardless, we may never know who truly started the fire. What we do know is that it revolutionized Chicago as we know it today, and it gave the city a fresh start to build on for the next 142 years and counting.
No comments:
Post a Comment