08 October 2011

140th Anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire

"Today and tomorrow, Oct. 8 and 9, mark the 140th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871."

Click here to read the full post on the Newberry Library's Genealogy News.

Click here to read about the fire on the Chicago History Museum's website.

2 comments:

Alan Wambold said...

Since I am from Wisconsin I have to point out that it is also the 140th anniversary of the Peshtigo Fire, which was an even greater calamity.

My wife (a Chicago native) and I took our children and visited Peshtigo and various sites related to the fire and read from various accounts of the human drama and tragedy that took place that long ago October. It was a history lesson they will long remember.

A couple websites on the fire are:

The Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871.
http://www.peshtigofire.info/

Reverend Peter Pernin's eyewitness account.
http://library.wisc.edu/etext/wireader/WER2002-0.html

Paula Stuart-Warren said...

Thanks for that reminder, Alan. It was a sad tragedy. The other fire in Wisconsin that affected my research is the Dodge County courthouse fire that happened in the 1870s, too.