THE CHICAGO AND BOSTON FIRES
DURINGthese years of unsettlement and wild speculation, the country seemed pursued by an evil destiny. About two years after business credit was so seriously disturbed by the incidents of “Black Friday,” a destruction of capital amounting to more than $200,000,000 was caused by the great fire in Chicago, and within another thirteen months came the great fire in Boston. It was a quiet Sunday on October 8, 1871, when a small wooden barn on De Koven Street, Chicago, surrounded by cheaply-built wooden buildings and lumber-yards, burst into flames. Sweeping ruthlessly through the fire-traps of the western division of the city, the fire soon got beyond control, wiped out the Union Depot and the Pittsburgh and Fort Wayne Terminal, and destroyed in this division alone five hundred buildings. This, however, was only a beginning. All night Sunday and the following Monday the flames steadily advanced over the southern division, comprising nearly the whole of the business district, and then to the northern division, comprising many private residences. Business blocks of brick and granite melted like wax beforethe flames, which swept clear up to the water-front of Lake Michigan, and spread a pall of smoke and cinders far across the northern sky. All the wholesale stores, the newspaper offices, and the principal banks, insurance-and law-offices were reduced to smoldering heaps of ruins. The court-house, custom-house, and other public buildings, and nearly all the hotels, suffered the same fate. Crowds of people, driven from their homes, camped in the parks and sought refuge in the buildings left standing.
In the southern division, which was the business district, it was calculated that 3650 buildings were destroyed, including 1600 stores, twenty-eight hotels, and sixty manufacturing establishments. The number of people rendered homeless was estimated at 2250 in the western division, 21,800 in the southern division, and 74,450 in the northern division. The total money loss in buildings was calculated at $53,000,000; business stocks and produce, $84,000,000; and personal effects, $58,000,000. This total of nearly $200,000,000 was swelled by the depreciation of property which naturally followed such a destruction of values. The total valuation of the city before the fire was estimated at $620,000,000, and the population at 334,270. The insurance in force in the burned district was about $100,000,000; but fifty-six insurance companies suspended, and only about $40,000,000 in insurance was collected.
The Boston fire broke out on Saturday, November 9, 1872. The fire-department was crippled in fighting the fire by a remarkable epidemic, or distemper, which prevailed among the horses. So completely were the horses of the city disabled that ordinary local deliveries of merchandise had almost come to a standstill; some of the street-railways had ceased running, and teaming by oxen or by gangs of men was the only means of moving freight. On Saturday, October 26, a meeting was held at the City Hall of the board of engineers of the fire-department to decide upon a course of action in case of serious fire during the distemper. It was decided that the strength of each fire company should be temporarily doubled by the enlistment of volunteers, and that drag-ropes should be furnished each engine-house for the purpose of drawing the apparatus by hand. But with these precautions was taken a step which probably contributed materially to the delay in attacking the fire of two weeks later. It was provided that the hose-jumpers should alone be taken out on a first alarm, and that the engines were to follow only in case of a second alarm, unless the fire was above the third story.
The neighborhood in which the fire broke out was at the corner of Kingston and Summer streets. This corner was then on the fringe of the business district, with the remains of some of the old aristocratic homes of the city still standing, which had, however, for the most part, been converted into boarding-houses. It was in a five-story granite block that the fire began, and the whole building seemed to leap into flames before there was any response from the fire-department. Inexplicable delays seemed to attend the arrival of the engines. The fire was already visible in Charlestown before 7:10, and the alarm at City Hall was received only at 7:24P.M.from box No. 52. Box No. 52 was known among the city firemen as “a bad box,” because it was in the heart of the dry-goods district, which was filled up with costly and inflammable stocks, and the principal water-mains were of insufficient size, put in years before, when it was a region of quiet dwellings. Only two engines left their quarters on the first alarm. Two others soon followed, but it required the third alarm, at 7:34, to bring out the rest of the force. Then, as the fire was gaining headway, went out the general alarm, and messages were rushed by telegraph to neighboring towns and cities to come to the aid of Boston.
The fire was already beyond control. Walls were toppling into the street, great billows of flame surged into the air, and the fire began pressing through street after street until it destroyed Trinity Church and threatened the Old South. At this historic spot was wrought something like the “miracle” that occurred on the field of Waterloo, when the burning of the chapel at Hougomont stopped when it reached the crucifix. The Old South was saved, and the fire was checked at Milk Street on the line between Devonshire and Washington streets.
The out-of-town engines in the meantime had been pouring into the city at allhours of Saturday night and up to Sunday morning, and rendered heroic services in raising a wall of water against the flames. Crowds of citizens gathered on the corners and watched the struggle to stay the fire. President Eliot of Harvard University mingled with the crowd, his mind weighed down perhaps by the thought of the injury to Harvard’s endowments invested in Boston real estate. Phillips Brooks, the young rector of Trinity, stayed in the church, then on Summer Street, near Hawley, until lines of flame were creeping along the rafters. Powder was used in some cases to blow up buildings and thereby destroy the fuel for the flames.
In Boston as in Chicago, soldiers were called to the aid of the civil authorities to patrol the smoking heaps of ruins, in which were buried many safes containing money, jewelry, and valuable documents. Serious as the fire was, it did not sweep over any such territory as in Chicago, nor represent half of the Chicago loss. The total loss in Boston was estimated at $75,291,530, out of a valuation for the entire city (which did not then include Charlestown and other suburbs) of $682,724,300. Buildings and property were largely insured, but the magnitude of the calamity again carried down many insurance companies and permitted them to pay only a percentage of their losses. Upon the whole, however, the insurance companies acquitted themselves with remarkable credit, the Massachusetts mutual companies, of which there were fourteen, paying losses in full except two. Companies organized in other States to the number of about 120, which had Boston risks, paid their losses in full, with the exception of four companies.