[The following is in regards to The Great Boston Fire of 1872. Context, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Great Boston fire of 1872 was Boston's largest fire, and still ranks as one of the most costly fire-related property losses in American history. The conflagration began at 7:20 p.m. on November 9, 1872, in the basement of a commercial warehouse at 83-87 Summer Street. The fire was finally contained 12 hours later, after it had consumed about 65 acres (26 ha) of Boston's downtown, 776 buildings and much of the financial district, and caused $73.5 million in damage.”]
The Ninth Regiment and four companies of cavalry were called out to control trainloads of spectators and bring about some order. The Dragoons, Horse Guard, and Prescott Light Guard joined the Boston Police to encircle the burned area to keep out “roughs” and the merely curious.
Boston Harbor was littered with floating beams, barrels, and boxes. On the docks piles of coal intended as winter fuel burned with a pale bluish light that would flicker over the waterfront for days.
The Advertiser printed the following memorable description of the ruins:
A walk through the ruins by night reveals the desolateness of the scene more impressively even than one by daylight. There is a weird, grotesque beauty in the prospect that is strangely fascinating. Amidst the crumbling heaps of rubbish in the cellars there are small fires flickering sufficient to reveal the fantastic proportions of the surrounding fragments of walls, and lend a ruddy glow to the rear canopy of smoke overhanging all… The mysterious, intense Rembrandt effects of fitful light and shade, the moonlight occasionally penetrating through rifts of smoke… the exaggerated shapes of lonely columns and irregular masses of wall, the silence broken only by the occasional hoarsely given order of a fireman… produce an impression… which nothing… can convey.
On Monday sixty-five acres of the wholesale district of Boston was a “broad plain of ruin” without a solitary lamppost or curbstone to fix a location.
Source:
Pletcher, Larry. “The Great Boston Fire.” Massachusetts Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival. Insiders Guide, 2006. 40-1. Print.
Further Reading:
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