Map Showing the Burnt District in Chicago
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The North Division was the hardest hit. Officer Bellinger had been one of the
rare lucky ones, for by Colbert and Chamberlin's count 13,300 of 13,800
buildings in this portion of the city had been destroyed, leaving almost 75,000
people--the overwhelming majority of the area's population--without a home.
Virtually the entire German community in the North Division was burned out. The
fire also destroyed the genteel neighborhood of the Old Settlers, and with it a
whole way of life. Gone was I.N. Arnold's grand home, with its extensive art
collection, its library of eight thousand books, and its memorabilia relating to
the Civil War and to Arnold's old friend, Abraham Lincoln. Gone also were the
lilacs, elms, barn, and greenhouse that filled a whole block just west of Pine
Street (now Michigan Avenue) between Erie and Huron. William Ogden lost to "the
besom of destruction" not only his Chicago home and businesses but also his vast
lumber holdings in Wisconsin, which fell before the great fire in Peshtigo, near
Green Bay, the same night. |
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But these men and their families were among the more fortunate victims, since
they had solid insurance, ready credit, other assets, and a substantial network
of family and friends. The less well-to-do in many cases suffered more severely.
It was likely that the fire consumed everything they owned, not to mention their
sources of income. If they had insurance at all, it was probably with one of the
local companies that failed in the fire. In one of the infrequent sympathetic
mentions of the poor in contemporary published accounts of the fire, Colbert and
Chamberlin told of those "who had no twenty dollars to give to a cartman" and
"no sympathizing friends down the avenue to give them shelter and other
comforts." If they perished, it is very possible that they had no one to record
their passing, especially if they had no local relatives. Estimates of the
fatalities, which mainly ranged between two and three hundred (by contrast, the
fire in rural Peshtigo was the worst in American history in terms of loss of
life, with some 1500 killed), seem surprisingly low.
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