On the same day that Chicago was falling victim to the Flames of Hell, several other towns in the Midwest also suffered the same fiery fate. Our first stop takes us across the Cheddar Curtain to the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin. In 1871, Peshtigo was a farming/logging town with a population of roughly 1,800 people. The townspeople would routinely use small fires to clear away brush and other debris so as to allow for building/farming. On October 8 of that year, a strong wind came in from the West and strengthened the smaller brush fires into one, much larger, fire. After burning for a while, the inferno became an all out, straight-outta-Hell firestorm, at some points reaching a mile high, five miles wide, traveling at speeds upwards of 90 miles per hour, and all raging hotter than the inside of a crematorium. At one point, the flames jumped the Peshtigo River and turned into what contemporary reports described as a fire tornado. When all the flames cleared, the damage proved severe. The conflagration had incinerated between 1.2 and 1.5 Million acres of land(aka, an area twice the size of Rhode Island). In terms of the Human cost, estimates generally put the death toll between 1,200 and 2,500. These figures are quite shaky, both because an accurate count was never done(partially because there was no one left alive to keep track of the dead in many cases), and also owing to the fact that many victims were thrown into mass graves. However, there were a group of nuns who had sought shelter from the fire in a church. Whiling away the inferno by praying inside of the local church, both they and the church escaped unscathed.
When the Peshtigo Fire got busy jumping rivers, one such span that it crossed was the Menominee River, which opened a pathway to Michigan, thus sparking the third raging inferno on the day, otherwise known as the Great Michigan Fire. The state of Michigan had just weathered a long hot summer, and in addition to that fact the logging industry had taken a firm hold in the state, with 16 different sawmills operating in the state by the 1860s. These mills combined to produce over 13 Million board feet of lumber, which made for a lot of excess pieces of wood left over from milling. When the Peshtigo Fire crossed over, this made for the perfect conditions to let the fire spread. And spread it did. When it was all over, the flames had burned the towns of Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron, as well as many other smaller hamlets. All told, the flames consumed more than 2.5 Million acres in Michigan. The human cost was even harder to tabulate here than in Peshtigo. The only solid number that ever came out was roughly 500, but that was only based on self-reported numbers. Given that there were thousands of individual woodsmen in the forests of Michigan, it is entirely likely that the death toll was even higher. There has been much discussion over the years as to the cause of the simultaneous fire events, and one of the more interesting theories is out of this world. Literally. It has been theorized that a comet hitting the affected area could have ignited the abnormally dry environs, triggering the blaze. As I said, this is just a theory though.
The final victim of the Great Midwest Firestorm met its demise not through flames, but via other means. The town of Singapore, Michigan had been founded in 1836 by a New York land speculator, who desired to establish a port city that would rival even Chicago and Milwaukee. That never quite happened, but the town did see several interesting goings-on, such as the 1838 bank scandal that saw the Bank of Singapore engage in some money-shuffling with a neighboring town. In 1842 the town was brought to the brink of extinction when it was pounded by a snowstorm that lasted for 40 days and 40 nights(kinda puts Snowpocalypse in perspective, doesn't it). Eyewitness reports in the wake of the snowstorm are spotty, but the general consensus is that at the end of it all, a wizened old man emerged from a giant boat in the middle of town, followed by 7 other people and what appeared to be 2 of every kind of animal, all capped off with the appearance of a rainbow in the middle of winter. Wierd...
But even after surviving all of this, the town proved no match for the Great Firestorm. Oh, Singapore was unaffected by the flames, but not by the aftermath. After all, rebuilding Chicago into the crown jewel that it would become by 1893 took lumber. A LOT of lumber. Factor in all of the rebuilding that took place in Michigan, and you have a Herculean need for lumber. And where did ALL of the affected cities get their raw materials? Singapore, of course. The town was so heavily forested in the years after the fire that by 1875, what had once been an insipid logging town had been turned into a vast dune-filled wasteland thanks to all the deforestation. Today the ruins of Singapore lie buried underneath the Michigan Dunes at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River.
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