Fire Museum examines the Great Chicago Fire

By Patrick Butler

We will never know the real cause of the Chicago Fire, how many actually died, or even the exact time it began, a panel of experts agreed at an Oct. 7 forum at the Fire Department Academy, 550 W. DeKoven St.

About all that is certain 135 years after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow allegedly kicked over a kerosene lamp in a barn where the fire academy now stands is that it was neither a cow nor a comet that caused the loss of 15,768 buildings, left 94,000 people homeless, and racked up between $170 and $300 million worth of damage, said fire historian Ken Little.
Little, a retired fire alarm office supervisor, co-author of a history of Chicago firehouses, and a founder of the Fire Museum of Greater Chicago that sponsored the forum, said that while some accounts say the fire started at 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 8, 1871, a recently discovered log book from Engine Co. 4 shows the first alarm was not sent until 11 p.m.

It is possible the delay resulted when a pharmacist near the O’Leary home waited too long to sound the alarm in front of his store, said Richard Bales, an attorney with Chicago Title Insurance Co. and author of the recently published The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.

It also may be that a watchman stationed atop City Hall may have “helped doom Chicago” when he misjudged the fire’s location, as reported in Donald Miller’s book, Chicago: City of the Century. According to Bales, the Fire Department had towers all over the city where bells would signal which equipment was needed where.

“You could be out fighting one fire and get a signal calling for help at another fire," Bales said. "It was a five-year-old system and not all the bugs had been worked out yet.”

While we may not even know much about how fire alarms were handled back then, the panelists agreed we have plenty of surviving myths about the Chicago Fire that do not hold much water, so to speak.

If the fire had indeed been of extraterrestrial origin, as Mel Weskin theorized in his book, Mrs. O’Leary’s Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire, would not at least one of the 335,000 people in Chicago at the time have recalled seeing a comet over the O’Leary barn that night, Bales wondered.

Also, despite the horse drawn steamers racing to control conflagrations in Currier & Ives prints, firefighters’ response time in 1871 was not what we would expect in 2006, said David Lewis of the Aurora Regional Fire Museum. “It took maybe 20 minutes to get up a good head of steam to pump water," he said. "Some of the early reports talk about engines arriving without enough fuel, so they tore up the sidewalks and fence posts to burn.”

Bales and Little said we will probably never even know what Mrs. O’Leary really looked like because she never allowed any pictures to be taken of her.

“The papers portrayed her as an old hag, about 70," Bales said. "She was really only about 44." Bales noted even the O’Leary descendants do not seem to have any photos of their famous forebear.

Nor for that matter were any photos taken of the fire itself, said Little, because there was no time to set up the still-cumbersome equipment. There are, however, a few surviving photos of the so-called Saturday Night Fire that burned just four blocks west of the Loop the day before the big one.

The most likely explanation for the fire, Bales, Little, and Lewis agree, was that the fall of 1871 was exceptionally dry and windy. That same weekend, some 1,500 perished in a Peshtigo, Wisconsin, fire where many of the victims had jumped into a river hoping to escape the flames, only to be boiled alive from the intense heat, Bales said.

Here in Chicago, the wind-driven flames traveled so fast many spectators who thought they were safe on the north side of the river were engulfed in flames, probably before most of them even knew what happened, Bales explained.

“The fire burned so completely there was nothing left in the slum areas,” which is why the Dec. 31 Chicago Times list of 300 confirmed dead is probably pretty low, Little said.

“They didn’t know for sure; they’ll never know,” Bales added, noting many of the victims were incinerated as the fire devoured the riverside hovels.

On the other hand, hundreds if not thousands simply may have left town, never to be heard from again. “There were stories after the fire about traveling salesmen dying in the fire, but we’ll never know for sure," Bales noted. "Some may have used the fire to disappear and start new lives elsewhere, much as people are now known to have done after the 9/11 attacks.”

Of course, there is always the possibility new information about the fire may yet turn up, much as the Engine 4 log book recently did, said Little’s son, Philip, a Fire Department captain and the museum’s president. The log, which runs from April 1869 to December 1874, gives what is probably the first official account of the Chicago Fire.

“It’s a permanent record we’ve never had before," said Ken Little. "There’s so much here we didn’t know before. We’re beginning to learn what daily life in firehouses back then was really like."

One thing that has not changed, Little said, is that journal entries still are handwritten as they were back in the 1870s. “They still keep track of miles and hours worked,” he said.

According to retired Chief Bill Kugelman, the log book is one of perhaps 4,000 items in the Fire Museum that include 1860s leather helmets, seven fire trucks, a 1923 water tower that remained in active service until 1968, and an 88-year-old Mack Bulldog engine that was not retired until 1956.

Ken Little is hoping for at least one more big donation—a permanent home for the museum, now temporarily quartered in Bridgeport at St. Gabriel’s School, 4500 S. Wallace St., where the Rev. John McNalis, a museum board member and assistant Fire Department Chaplain, is pastor. Museum hours are noon to 4 p.m. the first and third Saturdays of every month.

While there are no immediate prospects for a permanent home, Little believes the museum eventually will find a large enough place, with the firehouse on Roosevelt Road near Blue Island Avenue the first choice. “Our time will come,” he said.