Welcome to The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory, an online exhibition produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Academic Technologies of Northwestern University to mark the 125th anniversary of one of the most famous events in American history, as well as the most formative event in the history of Chicago.

The exhibition is divided into two main parts. The first, represented by an image of the burning city taken from a contemporary Currier & Ives lithograph, is titled The Great Chicago Fire. Its five chronologically organized chapters focus on the conflagration and the city's recovery. The second part is called The Web of Memory. Its governing image is a doll named Bessie, which was saved from the flames by six-year-old Harriet Peabody when her family gave up their home for lost. The six chapters in The Web of Memory examine a half dozen ways in which the fire has been remembered: eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism and popular illustrations, imaginative forms such as fiction and poetry and painting, the legend of Mrs. O'Leary, souvenirs of various sorts, and previous commemorations by civic groups and by the Historical Society. In both The Great Chicago Fire and The Web of Memory, each chapter consists of three integrated sections: thematic Galleries filled with electronic images of a great range of artifacts, a Library of relevant texts, and an Essay that provides a context for both the Galleries and the Library. The artifacts and texts included here are only a fraction of the Historical Society's holdings relating to the fire.

You can begin to view the exhibit by clicking on the Overview button on this page. Once you're back to the Overview page, if you click on The Great Chicago Fire or The Web of Memory, you will be taken to the corresponding Table of Contents. Before you do this, you may want to read the How to Navigate and Technical Support pages, which are also accessible through the Overview page. How to Navigate will give you more detailed instructions. Technical Support will tell you how to get the free software you will need to view some of the special features on the site. These features include a Shockwave interactive 360-degree view of Chicago in 1858, MIDI music files that play fire songs, three-dimensional stereographs of the post-fire city, and QuickTime digital video of a 1955 newsreel clip about the fate of the site where the fire started. Each Table of Contents page includes direct links to the special media pages for that part of the site.

We are interested in your responses to this exhibition. From the Overview page, you can go to our Guest Book, from which you can comment on the site.

If you are interested in learning more about the fire, see the Further Reading page. There is a link to it at the end of this introduction.

The Great Chicago Fire of October 8-10, 1871, was an event of such enduring fame not just because of the dramatic nature and enormous extent of the devastation, but also because of when and where it occurred. By the early 1870s, it was clear to Americans that the United States was being transformed into an urban industrial nation, and that Chicago more than any other city seemed to embody that continuing transformation. At the time of the fire, Chicago was barely a generation removed from its frontier past, but it was already evolving from a regional mercantile center to an industrial metropolis in an international economy. An obscure trading post at the beginning of the century, it had less than 5,000 people when it was granted its first city charter in 1837, just under 30,000 by 1850, and a little more than 330,000 on the eve of the fire. It had recently passed St. Louis to become the fourth largest city in the country.

As a result, the world's attention was already focused on ever-changing Chicago, and so the fire commanded as much interest as it did because it struck at a place so much in the limelight. Behind the spectacular story of a great city going up in flames was the question of how the emerging urban society of which Chicago was a symbol would respond to such a challenge. When the city was so quickly and decisively rebuilt, the validity and vigor of this new order seemed to be confirmed.

Like the several other fire exhibitions that the Chicago Historical Society has mounted over the years, the first part of this web site offers a reconstruction of this momentous occasion. In its second part, where it directly discusses how the fire has been remembered, this exhibit implicitly distinguishes between its own attempt to present the fire "as it was" and other perhaps less comprehensive and less self-conscious versions. But we would be deluding ourselves and misleading viewers if we did not admit that The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory is itself yet another way of remembering. Like all the others, it is shaped by both a certain understanding of the past and the circumstances of the present, which always condition one another.

One might say that the only means we have of knowing the fire is through the medium of memory, and that the memory of any event is a separate, if related, entity with its own history. The disaster that struck Chicago was something that we can describe in objective terms. While some of our facts and figures lack absolute certainty and precision, we can say approximately when and where it began and ended, and we can measure the devastation in acres, dollars, and lives. We can pore over thousands of photographs of the city before and after the disaster, and we can heft a mass of fire-fused hardware or a stack of charred cups. But at the same time we should realize the extent to which our information, accurate or not, comes to us through acts of memory that started to accumulate as soon as those who experienced this terrible calamity began to describe it. Journalists, novelists, poets, artists, politicians, scholars, clergy, businessmen, and private citizens have continuously reworked this epic occasion over the years, simultaneously drawing from and contributing to a massive body of remembrance.

In other words, to study the history of the fire is inevitably to sort through how it has been recalled. And how it has been recalled often tells us more about those who do the recalling and their lives and times than about what they recollected. Over the last 125 years, Chicago has paradoxically looked back upon its own destruction with a certain boastfulness that evolved into affectionate pride. The prevailing memory of the Great Chicago Fire is one of a booming city burned to the ground and then, thanks to the indomitable and unified will of its inhabitants, rising--as was said again and again and again--"phoenix-like," from the ashes, to perhaps even greater heights than had there been no fire. In this view, the flames both revealed and enhanced the city's character, but did not scar it.

This version of what happened actually exaggerated the extent of the destruction, enormous as it was, in order to emphasize all the more the marvelous recovery. In addition, it overlooked a number of things, including a considerable amount of human suffering, numerous expressions of doubt, serious class differences and political conflicts, and some reasoned concerns as well as irrational fears about the social order that such a catastrophe inevitably brings to the surface. Chicago did indeed continue to expand, but the years that followed the fire were not simply ones of unbroken confidence and triumph.

Why, then, was the memory of the Great Chicago Fire so positive right from the outset? First of all, it had a substantial amount of truth behind it. By any standard, Chicago's "resurrection" was at least as remarkable as its destruction. But there are also other reasons. The city rose so quickly and then was so speedily rebuilt because it was in the right geographical place at the right historical moment, and also because it was energized by the booster spirit of its leading citizens, which shaped the memory of the fire. Their bullish outlook was endorsed and fortified by the continuing stream of newcomers with no personal recollection of the disaster who swelled Chicago's population in the decades that followed. To Chicago's tireless promoters, including those far away who had invested in it, it was both imperative and natural from the moment the fire began to frame even a catastrophe in the most positive way.

By the end of the nineteenth century, recovery from the devastation was no longer in doubt, and the specific details of what had happened were not of great interest. But the story of the fire continued to fascinate people and draw them together. As the conflagration slipped out of personal and living memory, it became a kind of public commodity upon which different individuals and groups would draw in ways that reflected the ever-changing circumstances of the moment. In all such instances they reached into a pre-existing locus of shared memory--this mythic fire out of which a vibrant new Chicago was created--and, by so doing, enhanced it.

This exhibit attempts to make its own contribution to the memory of the conflagration by offering for scrutiny some of the major ways in which the Great Chicago Fire has been remembered. And perhaps its own mode of presentation, through wires and processors and monitors, is particularly appropriate, for it reminds us of the extent to which our sense of the past is always mediated.

So please return to the Overview page and proceed from there. Climb to the top of the Courthouse in 1858 and take a good long look at pre-fire Chicago. Follow the path of the destruction and flee for safety with the terrified populace. Read the newspapers that report Chicago's destruction in flaming prose, and linger among the haunting ruins. Thrill at the climactic chapter of Barriers Burned Away, one of the late-nineteenth century's most popular novels. Sing the fire songs. Judge for yourself as Mrs. O'Leary defends her innocence. Dine at the 100th anniversary banquet hosted by the Mayor and the City Council. Let yourself get caught in the web of memory.

      Carl Smith, Curator