October 8 · This Day in America
It starts in a barn on the West Side, on De Koven Street, after a summer so dry the city had seen barely an inch of rain since the Fourth of July. Chicago was built almost entirely of wood — its houses, its sidewalks, its very streets — and a hard southwest wind takes the flames and throws them downtown. For two days the fire eats the city. When it finally dies in the rain, roughly three hundred people are dead, seventeen thousand buildings are gone, and a third of a million dollars' worth of nothing is all that's left of the business district. A hundred thousand people are homeless. The cow that legend blames was officially exonerated more than a century later. What Chicago did next is the real story: it did not move and it did not mourn for long. It rebuilt, taller, and in the ashes the modern skyscraper was born.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1871
While Chicago burned and the nation watched, a firestorm swept the forests around Peshtigo, Wisconsin, on the very same evening. It killed somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 people — the deadliest wildfire in American history, five times the Chicago toll. But the telegraph lines burned with the town, and the news traveled slow. The deadlier fire is the one almost no one remembers.
Source: www.history.com