SYMHC Classics: History's Unforgettable Fires

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Recently, listener Greta wrote in and included a suggestion for an episode on the Pestigo Fire. Prior hosts of the show covered the Pestigo Fire as part of an episode on some of history's most unforgettable fires and some of the commonalities among those fires. In addition to the Pestigo Fire, there's also the Great Fire of London, the Great Fire of Mariki, and the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire. While talking about the Mariki Fire, Sarah and Deblieva mentioned the Great Conto earthquake, of which we covered on the show on June two, and on November we also took a longer look at the San Francisco earthquake and fire that's covered briefly in this episode. Thanks so much to Gretta for inspiring today's Saturday Classic and everyone enjoyed. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart ratey You Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to Blame a Chocolate Boarding and I'm fair Douting. And we recently covered the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which at the time was one of the deadliest workplace disasters New York and perhaps the entire country had ever seen. It was a tough one. It was tough to research and tough to talk about. It was tough to research because it was such a sad topic. But it is easy to see why listeners requested so much, because it was fascinating to learn about. We were really fascinated by all the little vignettes from survivors, rescuers, witnesses. Some of the points that really struck us the most were how quickly the fire started and spread, how split second decisions people made seemed to make a difference, and how it really influenced the lives of the people who were involved and legislation for years to come. So because of that episode, we decided we wanted to take a look at some other famous fire and just look at some of the parallels between them. Look at some of those little split second decisions and how that might be the same in one fire that takes place in the sixteen hundreds and then one take one that takes place in the eighteen hundreds, and then just see how they're different too exactly. And we're also going to take a look at the pre fire environment some parallels there. I mean, we saw on the Triangle Factory how it was really set up for disaster in a lot of ways, with the cotton scraps lying around, and the really crowded environment and people just generally ignoring signs of danger that we're there to begin with. So the first fire on our list that we're gonna take a look at is the Great Fire of London, a very famous one, and like the Triangle Factory fire, the situation here was really just ripe for disaster. Fires weren't unusual in London in the first place in the sixteen hundreds, since timber construction and narrow streets were really the norm at the time. So by September of sixteen sixty six, a long, hot summer had made matters even worse. It was a dry out both the city and its water reserves, and according to the BBC, some people had actually seen this coming. Some people had warned of the possibility of a major fire in London even before it got to this point, but most citizens at the time had something else on their minds, right Sarah Plague. Yes, Plague at that time had killed about sixty eight thousand people in the years leading up to sixteen sixty six, so they were worried about it, with understandable that that would be your top concern at the time. So when the Great Fire did start on September two, sixteen sixty six, started in Putting Lane near London Bridge, and it was in the home of the King's baker, Thomas Farnore, and a workman had smelled smoke around two in the morning and told the baker's family, and they had all managed to escape by fleeing over the roofs, and their maid was too scared to leave, and so she became the first casualty and this fire, even though you're gonna probably be surprised to learn that very few people died in this fire, considering how disastrous it was, she was too scared to get out of the house. Yes, the house was quickly engulfed in flames, and from there the fire spread through the narrow streets of London. But the Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, for some reason, really wasn't that concerned at first. He was woken up about an hour after it started, and after being awoken he said a woman might piss it out of the fire. That was the colorful statement he makes. So it kept spreading from there, and London Bridge was burning by dawn. So just to give you a little understanding of how they fought fires in this time, or one of the ways they fought fires, they would build firebreaks or create firebreaks by destroying buildings in a fire's path so that it didn't have anything to spread to. It would just be brought to a sudden halt. And the strategy had been used in a fire in sixteen thirty two on London Bridge and it created this open space that ended up saving the bridge in sixteen sixty six, so that the fire was confined to one part of the city. It couldn't jump the river, but it continued to just get word and worse on the westward side of the city, and it was fanned by the wind. And the mayor kept on hesitating though about the fire breaks, So even though they were tested it seemed to work, he wasn't willing to order a bunch of buildings blown up. And I think what that came down to was just the cost of it. It was going to cost so much to rebuild those buildings, and that's why he was so hesitant about it. But King Charles the Second fils a little differently. He did want those fire breaks, but by the time that he ordered the mayor to destroy as many buildings as possible to make that happen, the fire was already too out of control for that strategy to really work. They would destroy houses too late, or the wind would just help the fire jump over the gap that they made, And if you destroy the houses too late, you're just creating tinder. Essentially. Yeah, because it was all right if they didn't have time to clear it out before the fire got to it, they were actually kind of helping it along. So the fire raged on for three days. By Wednesday it finally started to die down, and then by Thursday it was extinguished. Flames did spring up again briefly at Temple Church, but the Duke of York made kind of a quick, split second decision there to blow up several buildings at once with gunpowder and create a firebreak right away, so they were able to squelch that. So the fire was out by that point, but the damage to London was really significant. A large part of the city had been destroyed, including a lot of the civic buildings old St. Paul's Cathedral. I think we mentioned that in an earlier episode on St. Paul's that one of many times it burned down. Eight seven parish churches had burned in about thirteen thousand, two hundred houses and according to the BBC, though only four official deaths were reported, but some people think that the actual death toll might have been a lot higher than that. But regardless of the number of people that died, it affected thousands of citizens, somewhere around one sixth of London's population, and they had to flee to places like Hampstead and Highgate and more Fields, which was that last one was the chief refuge I think. And within days they started putting together plans to rebuild the city, and Christopher Wrant and of all people, got involved with this rebuilding plan and presented plans to sort of remake the city, regularized the streets and um even though they stuck to old lines in most cases. They didn't just change the map of the city entirely. They broadened a lot of the streets and built houses out of brick instead of these sort of rough and tumble wooden houses that caught fire so easily. Yeah, but it didn't stop there. Like the Triangle shirtwaist factory incident, everyone was looking for someone to blame after this. It wasn't just a simple rebuilding. They wanted somebody to take the blame. So a parliamentary committee investigated the incident, but they couldn't find that it was anything other than a quote act of God. Even though a French watchmaker confessed to the crime and was executed for it, nobody really believed he did it, so people were still kind of always coming up with theories of what could have happened, especially since this was a time of political and religious upheaval. People pointed finger at foreigners a lot, and to Catholics for years. In fact, a monument that commemorated the fire born inscription blaming quote to the treachery and the malice of the Popish faction until eight thirty one, when we can presume somebody sort of chiseled it off discreetly or something. But um, it seems a little strange that there would even be a blame game if the fire starts in a bakery. I mean, it seems like a place where a fire accident could easily happen. Yeah, I agree, and I think most people accept that it was probably just the result of carelessness on the part of the baker or has made someone in the household, and we can rely on that at this point. All right, So our next fuire might also be the result of carelessness, but no one's entirely sure. It is a fire that happened in Japan in sixteen fifty seven, and the Mayaiki Fire or the Great Fire of Mayoraiki, and Japan's of course been in the news a lot lately, and a lot of people have probably heard of the Great Canto earthquake of nineteen twenty three, and it was a noon earthquake, which meant lots of cooking fires were going and so a big fire started across Tokyo and killed and estimated one thousand people. But before Tokyo was even Tokyo, back when it was still a do this fire took place, and it was the center of power for the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the fire was just as deadly way back in sixteen fifty seven, a hundred thousand people were killed. Yeah, And considering how many people were killed in that fire, it might be especially surprising to learn that Edo had actually been a little fishing village just a few generations earlier in the late sixteenth century, the showgun Tokugawa Ayasu had moved to Pan's capital, to Edo and started a series of developments there, and over the years the city just got bigger and bigger. Mountains were cut down to fill in, the bay at o'castle was rebuilt, and by sixty seven the city was operating under something called alternate attendance. Yeah, the alternative attendant system. And if you're trying to to think of what this is, it's kind of like a protoversi. Almost all the daimio or lords had to live in the capital part time, and when they weren't there, when they were back on their own estates, they had to leave some of their family behind as collateral, sort of like, don't get up to any trouble off in your own estates, because we have all you care about here. So there was this versioning elite living in ed Oh and and buying lots of things and in need of lots of services. So that meant a lot of regular folks were moving to town to provide those services, merchants and entertainers and the like. So because of all the crowding, the narrow streets and alleys set up in this Kyoto grid style, and of course built and lined with houses made of wood and paper, we're sort of at risk for fires. Fires consequently did happen a lot. Yeah, similar to the situation in London that we just discussed. But in Japan they even called these little fires the flowers of Edo. Yeah, just blooming across the city from time to time. But the fire that hit in sixteen fifty seven was the worst, and it started in a temple. Legend has monks burning an unlucky long sleeved kimono. Um, you'll see different accounts. Sometimes the kimono belonged to several young girls who died before they could wear it. Sometimes there were a couple kimonos, each having belonged to a girl who died. But anyway, this gives us the fire's other name, which was the furisode fire or long sleeves fire. You might hear it referred to that way. So strong winds from there carried the fire across moats and canals, and then the wind shifted and the fire burned the shops along the Sumida River. Supposedly, an unattended cooking fire in a Samurai household helped feed it further too, so it just kind of grew. Sixty percent of the city was destroyed and most of ed o'castle was destroyed. Yeah, and again, like London, the whole thing made the feudal government really reconsider how they were going to rebuild and whether there were improvements that could be made before you set up a similar situation. Again, and especially because by sixteen ninety three, so just a few decades after this fire, the population was larger than that of London or Paris, so you had a lot of buildings to consider. This time, they mapped out the city and spread the buildings out more. There were still, of course, later fires. They didn't totally eliminate that threat, but according to a book called an Introduction to Japanese Architecture, this was a fairly successful attempt, early attempt at city planning in a real turning point for the city. Yeah, and even laws that were made afterwards suggest fire consciousness. While commoners weren't allowed the extravagance of building a third floor in their homes, they were encouraged to use super expensive tile roofs and kura or fire proof storehouses, so both of those things kind of became status symbols. Yeah, so you have Sumptuary code, sort of just avoiding one avenue. If it, if it helps make the city more fire safe, go for it, even if even if you look impressive doing it. Yea, it became cool to be safe. So the first two fires we talked about are pretty well known, but the third fire on our list is one that got overshadowed a bit by another fire that occurred at the same time. And we're talking about the Peshtigo Fire, which occurred in eighteen seventy one, sometimes called the Great Peshtigo Fire. Took place obviously in Pestigo, Wisconsin, and it has the distinction of being the deadliest fire in US history. But the reason it's not as well known as some other incidents is because it occurred on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire October eighth, eighteen seventy one. Some people think maybe even the same hour, right, yeah, same hour, but a bit of a more mythical beginning, I guess, which is one reason that it might have overshadowed Peshtigo a little bit. We actually have a podcast on the legendary origins of the Great Chicago Fire, and a lot of people think it was started by miss O'Leary's cow. So if you want to learn a little bit more about that and how true it is, you can go back and listen to that podcast. Part of the reason why it was overshadowed, though, is because Chicago is a bigger city and news is going to get out faster about a huge fire in Chicago that leaves a lot of people dead. Yeah, Peschigo was a railroad and lumbering town, probably not as exciting as a big urban area like Chicago. There were about eight hundred men who were employed by a local would wear wooden't wear factory sorry, and to sawmills, and the town had about one thousand, seven hundred residents total. Once again, the conditions here were just right for a big fire. After harvesting trees, lumberjacks would leave piles of sawdust, brush, and limbs known as slash, all over the forest floor. To add to this, men who cleared the land for railroads and farmers who needed to clear the land to plant in would torch trees, umps, buildings, basically anything in their path. So small fires were burning around this area all the time and no one really thought anything of it. We're cool with it pretty much, but To make matters worse, there hadn't been that much rain during the summer in the early fall, so the area was especially dry. And by the first week of October, even the air in Peshtigo along the north shore of Green Bay was so thick with smoke from all of these little fires from the farmers and the lumberjacks and all of that that ships on Lake Michigan had to navigate by compass and harbor masters you fog horns to guide them ashore, so couldn't even see where you were going. Yeah, the environment, I guess just really set the stage for something eerie to happen. But no one knows exactly what started the big fire October eighth. A recent article in History magazine, I think in the March issue, actually discussed a couple of possibilities about that very thing. Lightning was apparently ruled out, but because of the conditions, some people speculate there may have been instances of spontaneous combustion on the forest floor. Always makes a story more interesting. Absolutely. Meteors that's another. That's another one that helps make things interesting. Meteor showers are actually pretty common in the Upper Great Lakes region in the fall so it's possible that chunks of a meteor could have landed in the Wisconsin woods and set all that tinder on fire. Yeah, and then strong winds that night would have added to the situation, fanning fires, causing them to combine and spread. So wind is a major character and all of these fires that we're talking about, and chances are even if it wasn't meteors, even if it wasn't spontaneous combustion, just all these little fires that had been set throughout the area. Once the wind came through, it kind of combined and helped them spread all over the place. But regardless of what caused the fire, around nine that night, there was an eerie roaring sound and then the fire just seemed to kind of fall out of the sky. Yeah, And and the wind really fed the flames, kept on feeding them, so it seemed like the air itself was on fire. People tried to outrun it, but they couldn't and some were burned in the streets. And the really strange thing here is it would seem like they were far away from anything that was combustible. They weren't standing near the burning building or the burning tree or something like that. They just would suddenly ignite. Yeah. I mean, it's like the witnesses said, the fire was almost in the air. And that's what's so scary about this one. Some sought refuge lying flat and clearings, or in the water of rivers, or in Green Bay, so they would actually get in the river and kind of hold their breath and only come up for air to try to avoid catching on fire. Other people hid in cellars, which wasn't a good idea because they suffocated. Some people hid in wells and in ponds as well. So the flames just kept on spreading. They traveled over marshland, and you might think that that would put it out because there's lots of water in marshy areas, but instead it would just ignite rising gases. And from there the flames were able to cross the Peshtigo River and jump the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. So from there the fire spread into other Wisconsin communities, including the Door and Kiawantee Counties. It also spread into Michigan. It destroyed at least seventeen communities total, and Pestigo itself was obliterated in just an hour. And we saw that in I think the Triangle Factory fire too. How quickly things seemed to happen. Yeah, so the fire just kept on basically until it had nothing left to burn. I think again, the winds have so much power. The winds changed and kind of turned the fire back on itself. But by that time it had already killed somewhere between one thousand, two hundred and two thousand, five hundred people eight hundred and Peshtigo alone and destroyed about one point three million acres of forest land. So that's an area about twice the size of Rhode Islands. And by contrast, three hundred people were killed in the Chicago fire, so way those numbers together. But by the time the word of all of this reached Madison, it took two days to do so. The governor and the state representatives had all gone to help out with the Chicago crisis because of course, that news had broken long before and everybody knew about it. And consequently, the Pestigo fire didn't really get as much notoriety as Chicago, but it did lead to some new forest management programs and lumber harvesting techniques. Again, a few sort of social reforms or fire safety reforms coming out of a big disaster. The last fire on our list is one that listeners will probably be most familiar with, at least from a visual standpoint, because it's the most recent one, and that's the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire. And to talk about this one, we've of course got to talk about the earthquake a little bit, I think definitely. So at five twelve am on April eighteenth, nineteen o six, a four shock shook the people of San Francisco awake in their beds, and about twenty seconds later the shaking started again, except it was a lot harder this time, and it drove people out into the streets if they could get out of their houses. Lasted for nearly a minute, which seems like such a long time to be just waiting for your house to fall down or not around you. The famous tenor and Rico Caruso, for example, was in town. He had just performed a big show the night before, and he described it like being on a boat at sea. If you can imagine how shaky that is. I'm sure some of you have probably been an earthquake, so you can't imagine it. But while the seven point nine magnitude earthquake could be felt as far away as central Nevada and southern Los Angeles. It was San Francisco that really got hit the hardest. Yeah, buildings collapsed. Weak masonry on the sides of homes kind of flopped off in sheets into the street, exposing dollhouse like apartments. Chimneys fell in on otherwise dirty wooden houses, structures, and formally marshy areas were just swallowed up in sinkholes. Yeah, there's a famous four story hotel that was swallowed up to the fourth floor and it just looks collapse. It's like a slinky sitting next to other buildings that are still their full height. Um And probably most importantly for our story, gas lines broke. But within half an hour, the city's fire department had been They had responded to fifty two fire alarms, and they seemed to be keeping pace. They seemed to be putting out these little fires, keeping things under control. But the fires just grew and they merged, and they spread by dry wind from two main origin points, and one was the south of Market neighborhood and the other was north of Market Street near the waterfront. But because the water mains had been broken, during the earthquake, the department didn't have that much to work with. They could put out these tiny fires, but when they were faced with these these growing walls of flame, there wasn't much they could do about it. Yeah, I think they only had eight fifty thousand gallons of water to use. So the alternate options they had were what they had to turn to, but those weren't really great. One of the alternate options was that they could tap old cisterns. Now, those didn't have much water, so that was why that wasn't a great option. And the second option that they had was to have navy ships pump water in from the bay, and that was kind of slow. So yeah, both these were slow and they didn't really get them that much water either. So to make matters worse, Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan had been mortally wounded during the earthquake. He had had a master plan for a fire in San Francisco, and his replacement didn't. Yeah, so they didn't have some sort of operating idea of what to do, and things got more and more desperate, and the department's next move, after tapping the cisterns and pumping in the water, was to use dynamite to create fire breaks, and we've learned the danger of fire breaks already in this episode, but this is kind of an even worse situation. The army base sent the wrong kind of explosive flammable black gunpowder, and the explosives really just made things worse. So exploding buildings would shoot off debris everywhere, which would ignite at ruptured gas lines. And then the other thing that would happen is sturdy walls that really might have helped actually service fire breaks were destroyed and brought to brought to the ground and rubble. So later that day other blazes joined the wall of the main fire. They were judged at one point to be nearly twenty floors high and two thousand degrees. One started in Hayes Valley from a damaged chimney, and another one started at the restaurant Delmonicos from a soldier's camp fire. And at that point the mayor ordered martial law. Yeah, and you can you can look at the order the proclamation, and it came out not long after after the earthquakes. Of course, people are still totally in a state of shock, and there's some practical advice like don't use your damaged chimney. But way at the top it says will shoot to kill all looters, and I think people were a little disturbed by that, and it was something that got a lot of criticism after the fact. But by Friday night the fire finally started to die down and it was over by Saturday. But by that point four point seven square miles of San Francisco had been burned, five d eight city blocks, and with so much destruction, you would think that maybe the large death toll three thousand to five thousand people where the result of the fire as well as the earthquake. But most of the deaths did occur during the earthquake because there's not much you can do when when something strikes and you're at home in bed, Whereas the fire people could see it coming and they had time to grab what they could and and get out, whether by ferry or or just going to other parts of the city. Yeah, some people had to relocate a multiple times. Chinese refugees, for example, who stayed in the city were forced to relocate over and over. Yeah, so they faced some persecution there, although not the ones who had fled to Oakland. Interestingly, but um just if there's so much out there on this fire if you want to learn a little bit more about it or look at pictures. You mentioned when we first started talking about it that it's a very visual earthquake and fire. There's a great Smithsonian story with color photos. Actually it was a year before color photography was commercially available. It's kind of strange to look at a color pictures from nineteen o six. There's another interesting Smithsonian story about the men who stayed behind to defend the San Francisco meant and protect three hundred million dollars that was kept inside it, which is the equivalent of six billion dollars today and had would have had a pretty tremendous effect on the economy potentially if that had all been lost. But they stayed right in the path of the fire and used well water, i think, to defend the building and it was stood the fire and became sort of a a memorial to the fire for the city of San Francisco because it was one of the few buildings that had survived. And today it's even in the process of becoming the museum of the City of San Francisco, so you can potentially go visit at this hallowed site of the fire at some point, and you can check out their website now too. That's where I found the Crusoe quote. They have all sorts of survivors accounts. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H