3-021-519 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Great Fire at Chicago: ruins on the north side of Lake-Street, 1868. Engraving of a photograph by Mr. George C. Pearson. 'The conflagration which took place on the night of Jan. 28 in the city of Chicago, Illinois...was one of the most destructive ever known in the United States of America; the amount of property lost being estimated at nearly three millions of dollars. Thirty-two of the leading wholesale houses of Chicago are entirely destroyed. The fire broke out, at seven o'clock in the evening, in the large bookselling store of Messrs. H. Griggs and Co., in Lake-street, one of the two principal trading streets of the city. A corner block of houses, at the junction of Lake-street and Wabash- avenue, was quickly consumed, whence the flames leaped across to the opposite side of the street and enveloped nearly the whole of the houses of business in Michigan-avenue, which in less than an hour were reduced to ruins...The weather was extremely cold, the temperature falling suddenly that evening to 11 deg. below zero; and this is humorously said to have been a well-meant "attempt to freeze out the fire." It was finally suppressed at one o'clock in the morning. The space covered by the ruins is about two acres'. From "Illustrated London News", 1868.