The Peshtigo Fire of 1871

Largely forgotten by historians, journalists and average Americans, due to another fire that occurred on the same day, which made headline news in papers across the nation, on the night of October 8th, 1871, a series of small midwestern fires exploded by the same high winds and tinder-dry conditions that destroyed 17,000 structures and displaced more than 100,000 people in Chicago. In the months and years leading up to the midwestern fires of 1871, Peshtigo Wisconsin had grown in population to some 1,800 largely European immigrants, who came to the region due to a logging boom fueled by the lumber hungry city of Chicago, some 250 nautical miles south along the western banks of Lake Michigan.

Overshadowed by Chicago

As Chicago burned, so did much of Wisconsin and Michigan, when small, isolated fires exploded into uncontrollable firestorms, which soon engulfed the town of Peshtigo. Surrounded by dense forests in every direction but the Peshtigo River, mothers snatched panicked children from their beds, while men formed ad hoc fire brigades in a futile attempt to beat back the fire. The blaze started as “a low rumbling noise, like the distant approach of a train,” survivors later recalled, as a cyclone-like firestorm rapidly felled the town, along with a staggering 1.2 million acres of densely forested land.

A Hard Night of Survival

Those who made it into the river in time, watched in horror as their town disappeared before their eyes, while many of the lucky survivors died of hypothermia before it was safe to come out of the water. Those who made it to sunrise found “a bleak, desolate prairie, the very location of the streets almost a matter of doubt,” wrote one newspaper reporter. “No vestige of human habitation remained, and the steaming, freezing, wretched group, crazed by their unutterable terror and despair…could but vaguely recognize one another in the murky light of day.”

Tragic Death toll

Eventually blamed on drought conditions and shoddy forest management practices, between 500 to 800 Peshtigo residents perished in the blaze, while as many as 2,400 died in the region that night, along with countless livestock and farm animals. While the fire has been mostly lost to American memory, the same is can’t be said for the residents of modern-day Peshtigo, who still honor the dead with a well-tended mass grave of over 300 of the town’s early residents—many too charred to be identified as a man or a woman, making the Peshtigo Fire of 1871, one of deadliest fires in American history.