Anniversary of the Great Fire

This week marks the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Every school-child in Chicago learns about the Great Chicago Fire that occurred on October 8, 1871. The terrible flames that swept the city that night killed over 300 people and leveled 2000 acres of wooden homes and businesses. The popular myth about a cow belonging to Mrs. O’Leary having kicked over a lantern that started the blaze persists to this day and is part of Chicago folklore. The city rebuilt rapidly, with the best architects of a generation flocking to Chicago to use the blank slate created by the devastation to experiment with new building styles, materials, and techniques.

Few are aware, however, that 149 years ago, on the same day as the Chicago Fire, a much more deadly and destructive fire broke out near the lumber-mill town of Peshtigo (pronounced PESH-tig-oh), about 260 miles north of Chicago right here in Wisconsin. That conflagration raced over 1,250,000 acres (600 times bigger than the Chicago Fire) in less than two hours, obliterating a dozen towns, 2,400 square miles of old-growth timber, and killing an estimated 2500 people. The exact number of dead is impossible to ascertain, because many people were reduced to ashes, while hundreds of unidentified people and body parts were interred in a mass grave. To this day, after a century and a half of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and forest fires, only one disaster has claimed more lives in the U.S. (The five worst disasters have been, 1) The Galveston Hurricane, 1900, 2) Peshtigo Fire, 1871, 3) The Johnstown Flood, 1889, 4) The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906, and 5) The Tri-State Tornado, 1925 in Mo, Ill, and Ind.) As is the case in many horrible catastrophes, however, there were human factors that made the Peshtigo fire much worse that it would otherwise have been.

Peshtigo lies on the western side of Green Bay, a finger of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. It was a lumber town that sprang up to take advantage of the gigantic white pine trees that grew in the area. These trees, many of them six-feet and more in diameter and stretching two-hundred feet into the air, were part of a virgin forest that once spread across the northern US, from Maine to the Dakotas. Lumbermen in the area harvested the trees, cut them into 12- or 16-feet lengths, dragged them to local rivers, and floated them to sawmills along Green Bay. There, they were cut into boards, loaded onto ships, and taken to Chicago. The treasured wood made its way via railroads to the treeless prairies of the Great Plains to be turned into houses, stores, railroad ties, wagons, and myriad other items. In 1871, lumber was one of the most valuable commodities in the nation, and northern Wisconsin was the center of that industry.

Peshtigo was surrounded by forest, although some of the land had already been cleared by loggers and farmers. To make access to the valued trees easier, lumbermen cut down every single tree in a contracted forty-acre lot, but they took out only logs that were bigger than two feet in diameter. Further, loggers were notoriously sloppy about what they left behind after they clear-cut an area. Everything else—smaller trees, branches, sawdust—was left on the ground to rot. Thus, much material around Peshtigo had been there for years, drying in the sun. Loggers left a virtual desert landscape behind them—a desert piled high with dry, combustible kindling.

Local farmers often sold the lumber rights on their land to companies who would do the heavy work of clearing the big trees from their property. The farmers then pulled the stumps and dragged the remaining material—stumps, dead trees, branches, etc.—into huge piles and burned it. Fire was just another tool for many farmers, and black ashes swirling in the autumn air was a familiar sight. That summer, however, the northern Midwest had experienced a summer drought so severe that the local swamps had all dried up and were as desiccated as tinder. There had been only one sprinkle of rain in Peshtigo since July, and every piece of vegetation was parched. Cranberries, the state fruit of Wisconsin, were a big crop in the area, and they grew in the many marshy bogs in and around Peshtigo. These bogs, too, had dried up. Even the two-to-three-feet-thick layers of peat beneath the surface were dry as dust. A strange phenomenon had been reported repeatedly before the fire in which whisps of smoke or even flames would be seen emerging from the ground to dance along the forest floor or curl around tree trunks. This indicates that fire was smoldering beneath the surface in many areas. All through September, people would be called to fight these fires with bucket brigades before they spread. Dense smoke in the area blocked out the sun on many days and led people to wear handkerchiefs as facemasks that would look familiar in the Covid year of 2020. By October, these fires had become so frequent that people were exhausted from fighting them, and a sense of impending doom was palpable in the town.

On October 8^th, something sparked the flames. Like the Chicago Fire, no one knows exactly how it started, but conditions near Peshtigo were primed for a fire. Making matters much worse, a perfect storm of weather conditions was closing in on the area. A warm-weather system from the Gulf of Mexico that had driven Wisconsin temperatures into the eighties—unusually high for the upper Midwest in October—collided with a low-pressure cold front moving in from the West. That collision produced “cyclonic” winds that gusted to over 110 miles per hour and spun off F-5 “fire tornadoes” that slammed into Peshtigo and generated funnels of fire that stretched high into the sky. The tornadoes ripped houses from their foundations and tossed railroad cars high into the air. That terrible day in Wisconsin, the small, existing fires coalesced into a massive wall of flames and spread rapidly, whipped into a fast-moving frenzy by those hurricane-like, swirling winds. Further, a forest fire often generates winds of its own while sucking all of the oxygen from its path. These flames erupted into an actual firestorm that reached temperatures of 2000 degrees—hot enough to melt iron and metal. The only previously recorded firestorm of this intensity had been the Great London Fire of 1666.

Horrible scenes unfolded in which people tried to survive by jumping into the Peshtigo River only to have their hair or clothes catch fire; many drowned or succumbed to hypothermia in the cold water. Dozens of people huddled together in a plowed field, but were consumed by the fast-moving, overheated air. Some people jumped into wells to avoid the blaze only to suffocate when the flames sucked all of the oxygen from the confined space. Because of the strong winds and flaming debris, the fire jumped rivers and destroyed everything in its path. Peshtigo had been a thriving town with lumber mills, a large boarding house, a factory that made wooden implements of various sorts, hotels, churches, homes, and stores. Nothing was left standing. Forests, farms, and towns were destroyed. At least 2500 people in the area were completely vaporized or left as unidentifiable lumps of charred flesh. In an area ten miles long and forty miles wide, well over a million acres of timber were burned.

Because it took place in a large city that was quickly rebuilt, the Chicago Fire on the same day has over-shadowed Peshtigo historically, but this blaze was much worse. Peshtigo never recovered from this disaster, and today, it is only slightly larger than it was on the eve of the fire.

The combination of landscape, wind, and specific conditions that created the firestorm have been studied numerous times since 1871. Scientists began calling it the “Peshtigo Paradigm,” and American and British military tacticians in the 1940s examined the blaze closely. As difficult as it is to believe, they were trying to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing raids against Germany and Japan. In February and March, 1945, similar firestorms were purposely generated by incendiary bombs in Dresden, Germany and Tokyo, Japan, killing a combined 125,000 people in those two crowded cities.

Next year will mark the 150^th anniversary of these fires. You’ll hear a great deal about Chicago, Mrs. O’Leary, and the city that, like the mythological Phoenix, rose from the ashes to become greater than before. Don’t forget Peshtigo, however, and the incredible natural disaster that took place on that same day.