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Flames! flames! terrible flames! What a fearful destruction they bring. What suf'fring and want in their train follow fast, As forth on the streets homeless thousands are cast, But courage! courage! From the mid'st of the furnace we sing. |
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George F. Root, Passing through the Fire, 1871 |
   Blazing Visions Stage, Story, and Song  Barriers Burned Away A Verse Sampler Fire Hymns |
While eyewitnesses, journalists, and fire historians claimed to base their accounts
on fidelity to detail, others took the great conflagration as an inspiration for flights of
creativity and imagination. There was, to be sure, much inventive embellishment in the
"truthful descriptions," but what might be called the literature and art of the fire more
expressly shaped Chicago's misfortune into aesthetic forms with a life of their own.
And there were plenty of such forms, all aimed at a broad popular audience. Poets of note, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Bret Harte, and Julia Moore, the death-and-disaster-fixated "Sweet Singer of Michigan, joined by songwriters like George F. Root, were among the many who set the conflagration to rhythm and rhyme. The Reverend E.P. Roe's Barriers Burned Away (1872), with sales of a million copies, was one of the most popular novels of the late-nineteenth century. Meanwhile, visual artists were also busy at work. British painter Edward Armitage depicted Chicago as a naked and prostrate maiden receiving the tender mercies of two clothed female figures symbolizing England and America. Almost as spectacular as the fire itself was Isaac N. Reed's and Howard H. Gross's Cyclorama Building, erected in the early 1890s on Michigan Avenue just above Monroe Street. Upon entering this turn-of-the-century mammoth exercise in "virtual reality," one was surrounded by a fifty-by-four-hundred-foot, five-part, 360-degree view of the destruction of Chicago. |
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