The Chicago Historical Society recently held an essay contest in which grammar school students were invited to write “What I Saw at the Great Chicago Fire.” About 1,000 submissions were received. All were read. Some were put on display. The following was found in the garbage behind the building.
For years, the central city had amounted to no more than four east-west streets immediately south of the Chicago River–a tiny business district penned in on three sides by tacky immigrant shanties. After the Great Fire burned a four-mile swath through these slums, relocating some 100,000 low-income residents, new investment poured into parcels downtown and on the outskirts, sparking a boom that the local real estate industry would fondly recall as “the great speculation years.”
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Bross, the son of an eastern lumber dealer, came west to Chicago in 1848. He sold books and a Christian newspaper before founding the Chicago Democratic Press, where he became the city’s first financial writer and a darling among east-coast and European money men. Evidently he hatched his urban-renewal scheme early on, for in 1853 he brashly predicted that Chicago had to wait “but a few short years for the sure development of her manifest destiny.”
The new paper’s first order of business was to install a puppet in the White House to preclude federal interference with the fire plans. Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, and in that very year the Tribune Company incorporated. One of its main goals, according to the corporate charter, was to make Chicago more flammable: the charter stated that the company might “manufacture in the city of Chicago or elsewhere, paper and other such articles as they may use in the business of printing, publishing and binding.” It also contained telling language that surely would have tipped off a more vigilant federal apparatus: ” . . . and shall have power to purchase and hold so much real estate and water power as may be necessary” (emphasis added).
Deacon Bross didn’t just want other people’s money; he also wanted their offspring. He encouraged the wealthy to send their sons west “to pursue a life of honorable execution” in a city of opportunity where local business was no longer concentrated among the relative few. Due to the fire, he claimed, almost all were starting even “in the race for fame and fortune.”
Bross, who served as Tribune Company president until his death in 1890, published a book in 1876 called History of Chicago, an attempt to establish as history his own “eyewitness” version of the Great Fire. The deacon didn’t say why the near-southwest-side alarm box closest to the O’Leary barn wasn’t working that fateful night. The fire department’s watchman saw the smoke from his perch atop the county building, but, since there was no alarm, he dispatched a fire wagon to a spot about two miles from the fire. “A combination of human error and mechanical breakdown let the fire get out of hand,” University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Perry Duis told a journalist recently. “Within 45 minutes, when the first wagon arrived on the scene, a square block had already burnt down.”
