1/1/2024 0 Comments Great chicago fire![]() Following the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871, commercial photographers. And burn it would.Ī previous version of this story included an incorrect estimate for the amount of damage the fire caused in today’s dollars. Part of a citywide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. On Sunday evening October 8th 1871 a fire broke out in a barn owned by the O’Leary family on DeKoven Street that spread a little over three miles across Chicago, ultimately destroying 17,450 buildings, killing around 300. Great Chicago Fire is part of WikiProject Wildfire, which collaborates on wildfire-related articles on Wikipedia. ![]() In early October, the paper declared, “We will continue to print these stories on conflagrations until the common council acts.” My photo of 1931 diorama depicting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 at the Chicago History Museum. ![]() The Tribune, operating from its new four-story “fireproof” building, had published all through the hot and dry summer and fall, almost daily stories about fires throughout the country. He would have known that the men of the fire department were exhausted. He could have observed buildings baked dry by the sun. But he was aware that it had not rained in Chicago in a long time and that many of the city’s wells were empty. He offered a grim prophecy, saying, “This is the last public address that will be delivered within these walls! A terrible calamity is impending over the city of Chicago! More I cannot say, more I dare not utter.” It may be history to you, but to me it’s a place I’ve paid for.” Fortunately six years later the home was designated a landmark by the Chicago Landmarks Commission.It was on that same night that eccentric businessman George Francis Train spoke to a crowd in Farwell Hall at Clark and Madison streets. Read their stories, letters, memoirs and testimonies from the 1871 disaster that destroyed 17,450 buildings and killed hundreds of people. Liebrich remarked that she “couldn’t care less about its history. Learn how the city of Chicago faced the most famous fire in its history, from the perspective of people who lived through it. The Chicago Tribune reported a few days later that “a small white cottage…remains unscathed in the midst of the dreary waste surrounding it.” Exactly a hundred years later, the then owner, a woman named Mrs. ![]() It worked! Everything around his little cottage burned to ground. He also cleared all the dry leaves on the property, then he tore up the wooden sidewalk and picket fence so the fire wouldn’t spread. Over two days, it jumped the South Branch of the Chicago River, destroyed the downtown. 8, 1871, on what we would now call the city's Near West Side. Both employed as policemen, Bellinger and his brother-in-law wetted down the home and its roof with water and cider taken from the cellar, covering the building with soaked rugs and blankets. The Great Chicago Fire began on Sunday, Oct. Boyington, the architect of the city’s water tower (the only public building left untouched in the burned zone ), it cost $500 to construct the home (or $16,500 with inflation). The most famous residence to survive the fire is the Richard Bellinger Cottage, a late 1860s Italianate that stands at 2121 N. My photo of Bellinger’s 1860s clapboard and shingled raised cottage. In The Great Chicago Fire, WTTW tells the dramatic story of a defining and prescient moment in Chicago history the Great Fire of 1871 when Chicagoans fac.
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