Carl Smith - Chicago’s Great Fire

The spectacular conflagration that struck Chicago on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871, is the most well-known urban fire in the history of the United States and one of the nations most fabled disasters. The flames that started in the West Side barn where Catherine OLeary tended her milk cows devastated close to three square miles of cityscape, including the heart of the citys kinetic downtown, and left around ninety thousand people homeless. The overmatched fire department was unable to stop it, especially once the roof of the citys new waterworks Pumping Station collapsed onto the machinery below. The relentless fire did not cease until it burned itself out in the early morning of Tuesday, October 10, some thirty hours after it began.

The Great Chicago Fire has had a powerful and enduring imaginative resonance. It immediately drew enormous attention, including a spontaneous outpouring of millions of dollars in charitable contributions from around the nation and the globe. This was because Chicago, which barely existed only forty years earlier, had already assumed a commanding position in the urbanizing and industrializing worlds widening transportation and communications network. In its insatiable ferocity and preternatural vigor, the fire was a fitting counterpart to this epic new city. Chicago had burst into being with an explosive force that transformed it in mere decades from a distant dot on the periphery of the American frontier to one of the countrys largest and most important cities. It was emblematic of the urban future and the disruptive arrival of modernity itself.

Almost immediately, many Chicagoans paradoxically came to see the heroic destruction of their city as an unexpectedly positive event, a stage in its irresistible upward development rather than a dispiriting setback. They viewed the legendary conflagration as merely the prelude to Chicagos triumphant recovery out of the ashes, a mythic second creation. The most important lesson of the citys apparent destruction, they maintained, was that Chicago was indestructible, since it emerged from this literal trial by fire bigger and stronger than ever.