Why Chicago Burned—And How It Rebuilt

Downtown destruction caused by the Great Fire.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

Ask that proverbial schoolchild about the Great Chicago fire of Sunday, October 8, 1871, and the most she likely can tell you is that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started it by kicking over a lantern. Mrs. O’Leary herself was exonerated of any wrongdoing in court and went to her grave denying the story, but the legend persists, and it’s far from the strangest explanation for the tragedy; smoking teenagers, spontaneous combustion, and a meteor have been blamed. With the rigid class structure and crowds of immigrants in Chicago at the time of the fire, however, it’s no surprise that the lasting story stars a bumbling Irishwoman. However, the reality of the city that grew in an instant, was destroyed in an instant, and rebuilt in an instant is much more interesting. What truly fostered the fire was the very quality that had allowed Chicago to blossom in the first place.

Founded in 1837 with a population of 4,170, Chicago, ideally positioned between the manufacturing centers of the East and the grain fields and mines of the West, was home to more than 330,000 people by the time of the fire. But such swift growth had given rise to haphazard zoning and slums full of shoddy wooden tenements. That, combined with the amount of wood in the city—including lumber from local mills, 561 miles of wooden sidewalks, and 57 miles of wood-paved streets—and a months-long drought, which had allowed the city only an inch and a half of rain since July 4, made conditions ripe for disaster.

Increasingly fearful, local newspaper editors and concerned citizens begged the city council to institute stricter building codes, or at least bolster the fire department, which, despite the fact that Chicago had suffered an average of two fires a day the previous year and 20 the week before, was dangerously understaffed and ill-equipped. In one of many tragic vicissitudes that weekend, the department responded to a mill fire the night before the Great Fire and worked until afternoon putting it out, exhausting many of the city’s 185 firefighters and damaging their equipment.

Making matters worse, once the sparks ignited in or near the O’Leary’s barn at 9 p.m. Sunday, October 8, the city’s alarm system malfunctioned, and then a watchman relayed the wrong location. By then the flames were already out of control, propelled by a 30-mph wind from the southwest toward the city center. As the blaze progressed, it made kindling of everything in its path, including the supposedly fireproof stone-faced buildings downtown. One such housed the Chicago Tribune, which reported that “the fire was not continuous. Standing to the windward we could see the fire raging at various points along this line at the same time. The intervening gaps were rapidly overwhelmed by the flames… . No obstacle seemed to interrupt the progress of the fire. Stone walls crumbled before it. It reached the highest roofs, and swept the earth of everything combustible.” Before long the inferno outgrew the wind, having developed powerful convection currents that allowed it to generate its own momentum. Flaming debris blown north sparked new fires, and the heat was so intense that wood spontaneously combusted.

At first most city residents ignored the alarm bells or enjoyed the spectacle, but when the fire proved capable of jumping both branches of the Chicago River, panic spread. Pajama-clad residents struggled to save whatever they could, hiring carts if they could afford them at the inflated prices or else jamming the streets on foot with what would survive of their possessions in their arms. As a visiting New York politician, Alexander Frear, wrote, “Everybody who had been forced from the other end of the town by the advancing flames had brought some article with him, and, as further progress was delayed, if not completely stopped by the river—the bridges of which were also choked—most of them, in their panic, abandoned their burdens, so that the streets and sidewalks presented the most astonishing wreck. Valuable oil paintings, books, pet animals, musical instruments, toys, mirrors, and bedding, were trampled under foot.”

The refugees waited in camps along the lake and on the prairie west of the city until rain finally doused the flames Tuesday morning. By that time a third of the city’s population had lost their homes (although not the O’Learys; their cottage survived). In its three-square-mile swath the fire had destroyed 18,000 buildings, 28 miles of streets, 120 miles of sidewalk, and 2,000 lampposts, in all more than $200 million in property, a third of the city’s assets. Some structures had been consumed whole, others reduced to rubble. Officials estimated that only 300 people died, a tally that seems low considering the number of immigrants who were doubtlessly incinerated in their crowded wooden tenements but didn’t have had local relatives to report them missing.

But if the fire was impartial in its destruction, it was more egalitarian than many forces at work in Chicago that month. Before the flames had died down, the city government was at work, meeting Monday at a church in the untouched West Division. Its first undertaking was to save citizens from economic opportunism, fixing the price of bread and outlawing price-gouging by hotel owners and cart drivers. But the city’s elite demanded more authoritative action to deter the theft of what was left of its property, fearing that the now-homeless immigrant population was unimpeded in its movement around previously rich neighborhoods and the city’s well publicized plight might draw out-of-town criminals.

The business leaders’ anxiety proved unfounded, but at their urging Mayor Roswell Mason declared martial law on October 11. A makeshift army of soldiers, state militia units, police, and volunteers enforced a strict curfew and patrolled the borders of the surviving posh neighborhoods, barring anyone who didn’t belong. Their reign lasted until a volunteer shot and killed a prosecuting attorney for violating curfew on October 20. Three days later, the mayor relieved the army of its duties.

In the meantime he assigned all responsibility for relief efforts to the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, a private organization led by members of the city’s upper class with a vested interest in maintaining strict social order. With money pouring in from around the world, the Society to its credit helped countless people, distributing food and clothing, building temporary barracks for the homeless, vaccinating against smallpox, supplying workers with the tools of their trade (including 5,300 sewing machines), and giving out materials and plans for cottages.

But the relief was not given out equally or entirely according to need. The Society functioned under the new idea of “scientific” charity, requiring meticulous investigation into clients’ backgrounds to assure their worthiness, lest it encourage idleness or dependence. The Society also offered “special” (i.e. discreet) relief to richer Chicagoans, who, according to Society literature, “were not accustomed to exposures and hardships which were easily borne by the laboring people, and at the same time the change in their condition and circumstances was greater and more disastrous.”

One of those newly homeless businessmen, William Bross, co-owner of the Tribune, boarded an eastbound train while the embers still smoldered to ask the New York Chamber of Commerce to help fund the rebuilding effort. Bross and his fellow boosters had trumpeted Chicago’s virtues since its founding, and they blew even louder now. The Tribune’s first post-fire edition featured an editorial titled “Cheer Up,” which assured readers that “the forces of nature, no less than the forces of reason, require that the exchanges of a great nation should be conducted here.” Time proved the boosters right. The devastation of the fire didn’t change the city’s advantageous location, and the miles of surviving railroad track leading into the city allowed rebuilding materials to arrive quickly.

Also, the same enterprising spirit that had catalyzed the city’s rapid, if flammable, growth in the first place now hastened its reconstruction. Much of the rubble was shoveled into Lake Michigan to create more land, and by the end of November, 212 new stone and brick buildings were under construction in the South Division. The rebuilding venture continued until 1873, bringing taller buildings to downtown and distinct divisions between commercial and residential districts (and between poor and rich neighborhoods). By clearing away old structures, the fire only accelerated Chicago’s evolution into its modern form. After the fire the city’s population doubled every ten years until 1900, reaching a million before 1890.

For the boosters the fire seemed like a crucible to test the city’s grit and determination, and the city passed with flying colors. Others took different meanings from the catastrophe. Some Christians sensed either a punishment for the city’s sins or a purification whose scale only implied a grander destiny. Those who decried the upper class’s increasing opulence celebrated the fire’s destruction of affectations and inessentials, while those who saw in the poor potential for crime and class conflict remembered chaos.

Modern eyes might judge the fire as both a refutation of the coming trend of modernism (the progressive city was still susceptible to the ravages of nature) and support of it (as citizens rebuilt bigger and better). In any case, one thing was clear: Nothing could shake Chicago’s position as America’s second city—that is, until the rise of Los Angeles.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.