Personal Experiences During the Chicago Fire, 1871

by Frank J. Loesch

When I arose about daylight Tuesday morning I could scarcely believe the sight which met my eyes. The prairie which we had so worked over the evening before and which we had left tenantless was filled with a mass of refugees who had drifted there since 2 a. m. Some one of our crowd made a rough count and reported over three thousand men, women and children camped there. As I walked about I saw many whom I had earlier seen as refugees. Among others were the two boys and the janitor’s wife with her four children. Every group seemed to be engaged in cooking breakfast. Judging by smell and sight I was of the opinion that the three staples which had been forehandily saved from the devouring flames were coffee, rye bread and sauerkraut. At my refuge a cup of weak tea and one biscuit was served to each adult. Immediately after that hearty breaking of a two days’ fast, several of the men started for downtown to find out something of the conditions and what we could do about getting to work or leaving the city.

Our walk was down Lincoln Avenue to Clark Street, thence into Lincoln Park at Wisconsin Street to North Avenue. There were still many graves in the old cemetery south of Wisconsin Street which had been incorporated within the park limits. Not a wooden marker had escaped the flames while former granite and marble headstones were in evidence only by the chips left of them which littered the ground. Broken china was everywhere, plainly the remnants of household things which had been carried there for safety and then abandoned to the flames which swept the dry grass, shrubbery and trees out of existence.

We could note the line of trees along Clark Street abutting the walk, which had burned down to the soil. A former double row of Lombardy poplars which lined the roadway to the park from Clark Street and North Avenue northeasterly could only be traced by the blackened spots scarcely above the surface. There were only a few people about in the burned over district. There were no police, no militia and no soldiers. It was a desert—a universal ruin with here and there only showing a stone or brick remnant of the wall of a church or of some former substantial business building, where a big city of people had lived in general happiness only three days before.

In our walk south of North Avenue we were often non-plussed to identify the cross streets since former landmarks had been completely destroyed and where brick business buildings had existed they seemed to have fallen into the streets making piles of debris. The Ogden House occupying the present site of the Newberry Library stood out prominently wholly uninjured.

The rails of the street railway on Clark Street had almost without an exception been burned out of their ties and lay about the street and upon the former sidewalk space twisted and warped like dead black snakes in agonies of contortion. The paving blocks had been largely burned over and out and were often displaced, leaving holes in the street. The sidewalks and everything which was inflammable had been burned.

On Chicago Avenue a lot of water mains had been distributed before the fire. Sticking out of one of these we found the legs of a man who had been roasted to death in his place of refuge, probably blindly sought by him in a drunken stupor.

We were told that a few hours after we had left Chicago Avenue bridge and as refugees in vehicles and afoot were crowding over it in the face of advancing flames, a small oil refinery near there caught fire, exploded and caused the death of over a hundred people by burning or by drowning in being crowded off the bridge or jumping into the river in the frenzy and agony of the crowd following the explosion.

On Dearborn Street not more than two hundred feet north of my late boarding place, we saw a gruesome sight. Only a day or two before the fire the son of the owner of a residence had recovered from an attack of typhoid and the tan bark had been removed from the street. The body we saw, as we learned afterwards, was the father of the sick boy. With a blind fatalism which can not be explained, after the man had gotten his son and family to a place of safety he had returned to the house determined to save it. To that end he got out the garden hose, wound it about his body and turning on the water undertook to put out burning brands as they fell, until a whirlwind of fire burned him to death. His right hand held the nozzle. The marks of the hose burned off were plainly discernable over his back as he lay on his face burned to a crisp.

Of my former boarding place nothing was left, even the bricks having largely been pulverized by the heat, and buried treasure of silverware was afterwards found melted to a shapeless mass.

I met there our next door neighbor’s wife. They owned their home. She had lost eyebrows and eyelashes and her hair was singed. Her story was a strange one. Her husband was downtown trying to save what he could out of his Sherman House Barber Shop. With the fire drawing near, she felt that her canary bird would lose its life when exposed to the great heat, if she undertook to carry it with her. She therefore decided to remain in the house and be burned up with it and her canary. At the last moment as she saw the flames a few doors away, her courage failed and with a heavy wrap, without a hat, she dashed out, to find herself almost stifled by the intense heat, and could barely get around the corner without being suffocated. She was unaware of the loss of her hair until told of it by friends whom she found after hours of wandering northward.