Monday, 6/11

MONDAY, 6/11:

150 years ago today the city of Marquette burned to the ground.

At the time, Marquette was 19 years old, and like most teenagers had grown up quickly and awkwardly. 4,000 people called it home, and it resembled a frontier town more than the place we've come to know and love today. Buildings were haphazardly constructed along the two main streets—Superior Street and Front Street--and wooden sidewalks allowed pedestrians to avoid the dirt-covered streets (and the waste byproducts of a major form of transportation—horses—then in use).

Front Street, Marquette, a year or so before the fire (Photo Marquette Regional History Center)

Marquette also had no municipal water system, no fire department, and only one hand-operated pump that could be brought down to the lake, filled up, and brought back to town to fight any fire that broke out.

On June 11^th, 1868, Marquette was a disaster waiting to happen.

When the sun rose that morning it was a typical day in 1868 Marquette; four wooden docks sat in Lower Harbor, some filled with iron ore waiting to be shipped out, while others were filled with merchandise waiting to be brought ashore. One dock held a very important shipment that had been brought into Marquette the day before—the altar, pews, lumber, and wainscoting that would be used to build a new church, one to be named the First Presbyterian Church. Another dock held the body of a Mr. McGilligan, who had died the previous day while logging and was in his coffin awaiting shipment back home to Canada.

Up the street from the docks, Marquette's nascent business district was starting to take shape. The first ever office building in the Upper Peninsula, the Burt Block, which was on the southeast corner of Front and Main Streets, held the offices of shipping companies, lawyers, a bank established a few years earlier by Peter White—the First National Bank of Marquette—as well as the town's first library, which held 1,500 books.

The Burt Block, which sat at the southeast corner of Front & Main, where the Upfront Building now stands.

While most of Marquette's businesses called Front Street home, Superior Street (which we now call Baraga Avenue) was designed to be Marquette's main street. Almost 100 feet wide, it was home to government offices, as well as a newly constructed city hall, which had just been built at a cost of $3,500 dollars. Above stores and offices on both streets lived the merchants who owned them, while the majority of the city's population lived nearby, on Rock & Fisher Streets, or across the Whetstone Creek in what we now call “South Marquette”.

When all those residents retired that Thursday evening, they had no idea what was about to transpire.

Around 11:30 that evening the night watchman of the Marquette and Ontonagon Railroad, a gentleman named James Anthony was making his rounds at the railroad's machine shop on the southwest corner of Front and Main, right across the street from the Burt Block. He discovered a fire inside the engine room of the shop, and tried to put it out with buckets kept for that purpose, but his efforts were in vain. He blew the fire whistle to alert nearby residents of the blaze, but before anyone had time to react, the fire just took off. Between a gusty wind that night and the massive amount of dried wood used in constructing the area, it quickly spread.

Where the Great Fire of 1868 began.  Then, it was the machine shop of the M&O railroad.  Now, it's a parking lot.

In fact, to use an overused phrase, all hell broke loose. The fire immediately jumped Main Street and seemed to spread in every direction all at once.  It headed north, to a developing area of Marquette called Washington Street, consuming everything in its path. Aided by the wind, it also jumped Front Street, where it quickly imperiled the businesses that sat between Main and Washington Streets.

The intensity of the blaze surprised everyone awoken by commotion. David Scoville, who worked at and lived above the Cummings & Hungerford hardware store on Front, and who spent the early part of the night trying to save the business, wrote in a letter the day after the fire--”The fire swept along as if was fed on nothing but shavings. We worked as long as we could with pails of water to keep the roof free of sparks, which fell as large as my hand in perfect showers. But the fire gained in spite of all we could do, and we commenced in moving goods to the street”.

That didn't help. As soon as merchandise was moved into the streets, it was consumed by fire. Philo Everett, a founder of Marquette, had a home and a store near the corner of Third & Main, and once he saw how strong the fire was started moving his valuables—clothing & furniture—out into the street where he would then take it to safety. However, while it was out in the street waiting for Everett to load it onto a wagon, sparks from the fire landed on the material, which then all went up in flames.

The fire's next victim was the Burt Block across the street. Seeing what was happening to businesses around his, Peter White made a decision that may have helped speed up whatever recovery Marquette was going to have to make after the fire burned out. He emptied his bank safe of all its records and cash, brought them down to the harbor, and sent them out on a boat into the water with several employees, telling them not to come back into the disaster had passed. This was in the days before the FDIC, so if the money burned with the bank, the cash would be lost forever.

Shortly after doing that, the Burt Block, home to Peter White's First National Bank of Marquette, collapsed in a pile of ash.

The fire also quickly spread down to the water, where it consumed several sawmills that sat near the shore, and three out of the four major ore docks. The Marquette & Ontonagon, Jackson, and Lake Superior docks were destroyed, along with any merchandise sitting on them, including all the material for the soon to be built First Presbyterian Church.

Said David Scoville, the gentleman who'd been working to save his hardware store on Front Street, ”the longest burning dock presented a most beautiful appearance, being about a quarter mile long running out into the lake, all wrapped up in flames.”

Having consumed almost every structure north of Main Street and down to the water, the fire was also moving south. In fact, it may have been so strong that it started to cause its own winds, which would've pushed it even harder. Everyone who could was helping out; the Hurley & Freeman livery stables sent every wagon and horse team they had to help merchants remove the stocks from their stores and bring it to safety. There just wasn't much left to save.

There was also something else to consider. The fire was moving south at a rapid clip. If it kept going, it would soon reach the area of the city where the vast majority of the 4,000 residents lived. While no one had yet died fighting the fire in the business district, the same probably would not be said if it reached the residential area.

There was one dock that had not yet been touched by the fire, the Cleveland & Spear Dock, which was set a little away from the others at foot of Superior Street. The steamer Northwest was berthed at the dock, and they tried to use the ship's fire hose to help fight the fire. However, it was just too far away from the flames to be of any help. Since the city's one hand-driven pump wasn't of much use in fighting the fire on land, the decision was made to bring it down to the dock, and hope that it, in tandem with the hose on the Northwest, could save the dock.

Before long, the fire reached Superior Street, where it consumed the structures sitting on the north side of the street—the brand new city hall, the U.S. Land office, and even the Mining Journal offices. Business and home owners on the other side of the street raced to empty their buildings of valuables, and brace for the inevitable destruction that was heading their way. Officials also begin to evacuate the residents whose homes on Rock and Fisher Streets could soon fall victim to the blaze.

Only, the fire never reached them. Having consumed everything in its path, the fire could not jump the 100 foot width of Superior Street, Marquette's main street. Four hours after it started, the fire finally died down, killed by what we now call Baraga Avenue.

The damage was widespread. Everything from Bluff Street down to Superior Street, and from Fourth Street to the lake shore, was gone. In all, 100 buildings were destroyed, and 40 families, mostly families of local merchants, were homeless. But in hindsight that was nothing compared to what could've happened if the fire had jumped across Superior Street.

The day after the Great Fire, taken from Blaker Street behind what is now the Landmark Inn (Photo Marquette Regional History Center)

Aside from the buildings destroyed in the fire, three of the four docks in the harbor had been destroyed, along with 40 ore cars, 500 tons of pig iron, 192 of limestone, and 80,000 feet of lumber. The city library was gone, as was the town hall and all city records. The U.S. land office lost all of the deeds & records it held, along with $10,000 in cash (which would be $190,000 today). The only stores left in Marquette were a butcher shop and a hardware store on the south side of Superior Street.

In all damage caused by the fire was $1.5 million, which would be over $26 million today. Only 20 percent of damage was covered by insurance, which means that in today's dollars over 20 million bucks went up in smoke.

Surprisingly, no one died, although the body of Mr. McGilligan had been given an unexpected cremation on one of the docks. Only two people were injured—Mr. Cole, hurt by a falling timber, and an unnamed known man whose face was burned.

The rebuilding of Marquette started almost immediately, even before cleanup was finished. Peter White brought his bank records and deposits back on shore when the fire died down, and opened for business the next morning at 9. Because there were no buildings left standing, they set up in a shanty in the railroad yards just south of the Cleveland & Spear Dock, where they made a counter of planks laid across two pork barrels. From there, they started handing out the money that would go toward the rebuilding of Marquette.

James Wilkinson, a Marquette lawyer who had his office in the Burt Block, wrote “I am surprised at the amount of the pluck being exhibited by business men. They are beginning to rebuild, are putting up temporary shacks, and the prospect is that the business portion of the town will soon be rebuilt.”

The Cleveland & Spear dock was running 24 hours a day, not just for that company but for merchants shipping materials in and and other iron companies shipping ore out. In fact, George Spear once joked that the family fortune was made right after the great fire, with the non stop use of the dock. Most stores reopened in temporary facilities within a month, and even the First Presbyterian Church was able to get new material shipped to Marquette and had their first service at Christmas of 1868.

Less than a year after the fire--March 3^rd, 1869, to be specific--Peter White, Samuel Ely, and Frederick Wetmore established the Marquette Water & Fire Board, and led a bond drive to raise the funds to purchase a $55,000 fire system (which would be worth almost a million dollars today). The system gave the city a network of hydrants, as well as several horse-drawn firefighting trucks. It also allowed the city to put together its first water delivery system to residential homes, the underpinnings of the system we still use today.

It took several years, but the city did begin to rise from the ashes of the inferno. To make sure it never happened again, the city banned the use of wood as a downtown building material. Builders turned to readily available local materials—especially sandstone—and within a few years, Marquette's downtown had recovered and began to take a shape that's familiar to residents these days--

The rebuilt downtown Marquette, 1905.  Photo Michigan State Historical Society.

Since then, there have been major fires in Marquette, and several of the city's iconic buildings—the Opera House, the Nester Block, and the First Baptist Church among others—were lost. But never again did the city have to suffer through such a disaster as the Great Fire of 1868, a disaster that almost wiped Marquette off the face of the earth.

A disaster that occurred 150 years ago today.

(jim@wmqt.com)