The Weather Notebook: The Great Peshtigo Fire

The Great Peshtigo Fire
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Dave Thurlow, Host

Where there's smoke, there's fire. And if the weather is right, there's probably another one close by. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

The Peshtigo Fire Museum
You've probably heard all about the Great Chicago Fire. A fire which started on the night of October 8, 1871, and quickly swept three square miles of the Windy City. After a summer of drought and a very dry first week of October that year, the city built of wood was primed for fire. A third of Chicago's homes were lost. 300 people were killed. But the death toll was actually far worse north of Chicago, due to another fire in a little known lumbering town called Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

Peshtigo sits on Green Bay, right on the edge of pine forests that were being harvested for, among others, buildings in Chicago that were now burning. All through the late summer of 1871, fires cropped up in the pine slash left behind from logging. On October 8, it was very windy and very dry.

That night, people strolling through Peshtigo heard a strange roar and saw a glow to the southwest. Suddenly embers started dropping from the sky. A huge forest fire was making its own circulation, like a tornado. It threw out fiery debris and pulled in gale-force winds. In less than an hour, the town was ablaze. Now, the cause of the fire is unknown. But whether it was a spark from a train or a lantern kicked over by a cow that ignited the blaze, it was ultimately caused by the hot, dry summer. And that killed 1,500 people across the MidWest on that terrible night of October 8th.

Today's contributing writer is Robert Henson. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.