From the early 1920s, the week of October 8 has been observed in Canada and the United States as Fire Prevention Week.
Many understand that this date was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire – an event that happened 150 years ago this month.
But few people realize the full extent of the horror unleashed on the night of October 8, 1871. The carnage rivalled that of 9/11 and affected a massive swath of the American Midwest from the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin to Port Huron, Michigan, and the shores of the St. Clair River on the Canadian shore.
The 150-year-old event has come down in history as “The Night America Burned.”
We all grew up hearing tales and songs about the cow in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn who supposedly kicked over a lantern at137 De Koven Street and set the city of Chicago ablaze. It would be 1893 before Michael Ahern, a reporter for the Chicago Republican newspaper, would admit to concocting the anti-Irish lie.
But the destruction on that awful night was very real. The city’s population of 300,000 fled in terror as 100-foot walls of flame engulfed Chicago. Most of the city’s firefighters had been up throughout the previous night, battling a 17-hour blaze at a planning mill that had destroyed four city blocks. They were exhausted.
By the following morning, 300 Chicagoans were dead, 17,500 buildings had been destroyed, and 100,000 were homeless.
But the horror of that night was far from over.
Heat and drought throughout the summer of 1871 had left conditions tinder-dry across the U.S. Midwest. By October, it had not rained for months. Buildings – and even sidewalks – were made of wood. Sawdust was even used on the town and village roads to lessen the clouds of dust on the region’s dirt roads.
But on the night of October 8, numerous small fires burning across the Midwest were fanned into a ferocious conflagration by hot, hurricane-force winds.
Survivors described the arrival of the gale-fuelled inferno in the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin as sounding like a freight train. Within less than a minute, the entire town was ablaze. Fifty people died in one tavern alone, in which they had futilely sought shelter. Mothers were said to have slain their own children and then killed themselves, to avoid the anguish of burning alive.
With over 1,000 lives lost, the death toll in this little Wisconsin lumber town was more than three times greater than that of the Great Chicago Fire, but the disaster in Peshtigo remains largely forgotten.
In Michigan on that same calamitous night, hundreds more perished in the monstrous fires. More than one million acres of forest were destroyed, much of it in the “Thumb,” or Upper Peninsula. The cities of Alpena, Holland, Manistee and Port Huron became scenes of smoking ruins, attacked by the same ember-infused winds that were laying waste to Chicago and a multitude of midwestern communities.
Fifty people died in Port Huron alone. It seemed as if the world was ending in one night’s furious holocaust of fire.
Smoke from burning buildings in Port Huron was blown across the St. Clair River, obscuring visibility and causing a tug and a schooner to collide.
In all, the fires of October 8, 1871, took over 2,500 lives. Yet today, for those of us who actually observe the arrival of Fire Prevention Week, the tragedy of the night for which it is commemorated seldom comes to mind.
But “The Night America Burned’ has true lessons for all of us.
Whether you are roasted alive listening to the sounds of your own screams – like many in towns throughout the Midwest – or succumb in your sleep to smoke inhalation, like my “forever-24-year old sister," Frances – the effects are the same. You’re dead.
If you do nothing else this Fire Prevention Week, make sure that your home has a working smoke alarm.
Smoke Alarms Save Lives.
Editor's note: Mr. Egan lost his sister Frances in a house fire.
