Great chicago fire

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871

This could probably be the biggest cover up in the history of mankind. At the same time, it could be a case of the mind boggling stupidity. I will present...

< --Previous Up Next–> John Jex Bardwell was born in London in 1824. (“I celebrated with much howling and kicking, and from all accounts have kept it up more or less ever since,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.) He first came to Michigan with his family in 1834 (they landed in Detroit at the Steamboat Hotel […]

Your ancestors may have been affected by the October 8, 1871 great Chicago fire.

Great Chicago Fire, conflagration that began on October 8, 1871, and burned until early October 10, devastating an expansive swath of the city of Chicago. The fire, the most famous in American history, claimed about 300 lives, destroyed some 17,450 buildings, and caused $200 million in damage.

On a hot and dry October night in 1871, a cow kicked over a lantern in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, starting a blaze that rose up from her modest Near Southwest Side home, leapt the Chicago Riv…

Ever since mankind first began building structures out of wood rather than stone, fire has been a part of the learning process. In fact, so common have these infernos been throughout history that nearly every major city in the world has been largely burnt to the ground at one time or another in its history. Some, in fact, have burned repeatedly. For example, Constantinople was burned no fewer than five times between 406 and 1204 only to be, like a damaged anthill, rebuilt each time, thereby…

Scott Phillips searches old newspapers to learn more about some of the major fires in our country’s history—including one he and his family lived through.