This is a partial rerun of a piece I did several years ago. As today is the 140th Anniversary of the Great chicago Fire, I thought it might be worth sharing. What lessons can we learn from these events? How can something that happened that long ago shape our lives today?
If you read the papers today, you know that there is much talk about immigration of all kinds, especially the impoverished illegals who are willing to take dangerous chances to get here. Those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are jealous and concerned that immigrants will take their jobs. Those at the top are happy to exploit the misfortune of others to get cheap labor and increase their profits. Neither of them, nor those in the middle, want to associate with the newcomers, for fear that their strange ways present a danger to their way of life. Well the same was true in nineteenth century America, only it was the Irish immigrants, not the Hispanics, Asians or Middle Easterners who were the object of suspicion and contempt. Remember, too, that at that time they were mostly illiterate (the Brits having discouraged, if not forbidden, the education of the Irish), and many of them spoke English as a second language, not a first. And they practiced a strange religion – Catholicism – which had rituals in yet another foreign tongue – Latin, and was itself grounds for social ostracism. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, was known to harbor ill will toward the Irish immigrants, due in part to his political fears that they might be organized as a voting block, even as their labor was harnessed to build the national railroad system and to fight in the Union Army . No doubt you’ve heard the expression "paddy wagon" referring to a police squadrol. The phrase dates back to this time, and refers to the fact that police cargo consisted primarily of young Irish men, or "Paddys" (short for Padraig, the Irish spelling of Patrick) hauled off to the jails, often for offenses which were the nineteenth century equivalent of a DWB. In short, the Irish immigrants were regarded as the "scum of the earth" and it was not uncommon in the late nineteenth century for "help wanted" signs to include the bitter coda: No Irish need apply
As if the derision of the natives is not bad enough, there are always those immigrants who arrive first in a new place and promptly figure out how to win the confidence of those of their people that follow, and then take unscrupulous advantage of them through various forms of trickery. The Irish who did this were called "Gombeen men" after those who had done the bidding of the landlords in the old country, and they were as predatory as any payday lender. Young Thomas and his bride Nellie surely found themselves walking in a minefield of potential calamity in what was supposed to have been the promised land.
Be that as it may, fortune smiled a little bit on my great-grandfather Thomas, and he found work with the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. In fact, he was one of the very first Irish immigrants to be hired by the C&NW. (He must have proved a good worker, because the railroads soon had a large workforce of Irish immigrants) We don’t know exactly what he did, the census just describes him as a "laborer." We know he did not work as an engineer or fireman on the trains, nor did he serve as a conductor or trainman on the passenger trains. Those jobs were all too good for poor paddys. Most likely his work involved some laying or maintaining track, or possibly warehouse work – loading and unloading. Whatever it was, it was surely backbreaking physical labor, exposed to the weather year round, and many of his co-workers succumbed to crippling injuries or death on the job. So when you ride a train today, whether the Amtrak or a just a commuter line, remember that you do so by the blood and sweat of your forebears.
We don’t know how big a man Thomas was, but Pop (my grandfather, born 1866 in Chicago) stood about 5’9 or 5’10, and was not regarded as a small man in his day. Thomas, with his limited diet primarily of potatoes and cabbage as a child was probably smaller – likely not more than 5’6 or 5’7. The one existing photo suggests a wiry build. At the time it was taken he was an older man and with a balding head and just a wispy beard, looking something like the "Smith Brothers" on the cough drop boxes.
In short order the Flahertys were blessed with more children, and by 1871, they were a family of five. Margaret, born circa 1868, and named for Nellie’s mother and little Thomas, born circa 1870. As their family grew, so did the city. Chicago then was not like you think of it now. In fact, much of what is now the city was originally built on a swamp. There were no sidewalks, but walkways had to be constructed to keep people’s feet out of the mud – and so they were, out of wooden planks. Each builder put in his own sidewalk, not necessarily level with his neighbor, and there were so many stairs from lot to lot that it was sometimes referred to as "the city of ups and downs." The streets, too, were made of wooden planks. Finally, the vast majority of houses were built of wood in a manner known as the "balloon frame" construction.
On October 8th of that year, just after Pop’s fifth birthday, and a long, hot, dry summer, disaster struck the city. There had been no rain for three weeks, and the wooden streets and sidewalks were covered with the dry, dead leaves that had fallen from the trees that still grew everywhere in the city. The fire began as a spark on the south side of the city, but rapidly consumed the wooden buildings and sidewalks and worked its way north. Strong winds whipped the flames ever farther northward, and it became apparent to those on the north side in the tenement where the Flahertys lived that they, too, would soon be imperiled.
Because the river lay between the fiery south side and the near north, there was a little time, and they made a decision to attempt to save some of their worldly goods. Thomas, and probably most of his neighbors, worked furiously to dig in the soil behind the house and bury their meager belongings – mostly furniture – with dirt in the hopes that they could be spared from the fire. (Perhaps this was a technique he’d learned watching the soon-to-be evicted in Ireland trying to save their possessions.) We know the buried furniture story to be true because one table was left with a leg standing above the earth, and that leg was burned flush to the ground. (That table remained in Pop’s house probably until after the WWII.) Some Chicagoans who had the money made their way to the C&NW and crammed into the last trains fleeing northwest towards Wisconsin.
Within a few hours, however, it became apparent that there was no more time for possessions, and that the young parents must act swiftly to save themselves and their children. As a railroad worker, Thomas knew that the Chicago Avenue roundhouse on Goose Island where it might be safe. He and Nellie grabbed the children and ran several blocks to the bridge. According to Pop, Nellie, who was five months pregnant at the time, carried baby Thomas in her arms during the whole terrifying journey, as they dragged young Michael and his toddler sister Margaret along. Imagine Nellie’s heart pounding as she and Thomas reached the bridge, with their small children crying and hanging on for dear life. What anxious thoughts must have raced through their minds as they ran? How could they protect their little ones from this unthinkable peril? Had they escaped certain starvation in Ireland and the possibility of a watery grave in the Atlantic only to perish in a conflagration worse than any fire and brimstone preached in church? She tripped on the bridge and broke a bone in her leg, but in her desperation to escape the blaze, with Tom's help she pulled herself up and continued on the leg, a run which would hobble her for the rest of her days.
According to Pop, by the time they reached the bridge, it had become clear to those on the island side that they dared not leave that wooden bridge connected to the fiery mainland side of the river, and Tom and Nellie had barely made it across before the bridge was drawn up, with those behind left to face the inferno now raging north of the river. "The sky" as Pop later described it, "was all one red blaze." One of Pop’s more gruesome memories involved seeing a little girl whose hair had caught fire, running but unable to escape the flames that had overtaken her. The haunting events made such an impression upon Pop that he could still describe it in detail, ninety years after the fact.