155 years ago yesterday today the city
of Marquette burned to the ground.
The timing hasn't worked out the past
couple of years for me to re-tell the story of the Great Fire of 1868
on its actual anniversary. So I'm not gonna let that stop me this year.
Ready for a tale?
In 1868, 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).
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 11th, 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 use 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 coffin awaiting shipment
back home to Canada.
Up the street from the docks, Marquette
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.
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 night 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, the fire just
took off.
In fact, to use an overused phrase, all
hell broke loose. The fire immediately jumped Main Street and
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 who was 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 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 began o move
south. It was so strong it started to cause its own winds, which
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 them 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's just too far
away from the flames to be of any help. Since the city's one
hand-driven pump isn'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, can 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 race to empty their buildings of valuables, and
brace for the inevitable destruction that's 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 reaches 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 dies 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 Superior Street.
******
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 tons 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 facility.
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
3rd, 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--
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
other—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 155 years ago
yesterday.
(jim@wmqt.com)
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