Irish immigrant Patrick Webb lived with his wife and children in a frame house he’d built on Church Street, at what is now 1826 N. Hudson Ave.
He went to work Monday as a day laborer for the Chicago & North Western Railway, but then his foreman told him to go home at 10 a.m.
Fire had already consumed areas a block east of Webb’s home as it moved north, “so we thought we were safe,” he recalled. But then another wave of fire approached.
“I saw some poor men digging pits in the ground and putting their little household property in them, so I thought I would do the same,” Webb recalled. “And three of us went to work as hard we could.”
After they’d buried their belongings, Webb—who was wearing just his underclothes, overalls, and overshirt—asked his wife to hand him his clothes. “But to my surprise, she told me she did not see them — but supposed they were in the put, and covered up with the other things.”
They fled north.
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James Hildreth led more efforts to halt the fire’s progress—this time by exploding buildings at the fire’s south end.
Tribune editor Horace White, who lived nearby, recalled:
"We heard loud detonations, and a rumor went around that buildings were being blown up with gunpowder. … The reverberations … gave us all heart again. …
"Think of a people feeling encouraged because somebody was blowing up houses in the midst of the city, and that a shower of bricks was very likely to come down on their heads!"
Fire Marshall Robert A. Williams, recalling the morning of Monday, Oct. 9, 1871:
"My eyes were so full of dirt and dust that I couldn’t see. …
"There was some engines coming in from Milwaukee, and they were scattered around, and there was men coming to me to get engines to play on this coal pile and that safe and that vault. …
"I was completely tired out and wet to the skin. I jumped in my wagon and drove up to where my wife was and changed my clothes and drank a cup of tea and had two bites of bread, and I couldn’t swallow it. …
On the Sands, Mary Howe Poole and her family hired a man in a rowboat to take them out to the lighthouse along the north edge of the Chicago River's harbor.
"I was fortunate in having $40 in cash on my person," she later recalled.
"The lighthouse pier, as we disembarked from the rowboat, caught on fire. Hastily the women and children were huddled inside, while the men with axes and water fought the flames — cutting them off."
Strangely enough, "a cow had wandered for safety out to the lighthouse," Poole later recalled. The cow was milked to feed Poole's infant daughter.
“One of our party said we must work our way to the water’s edge,” Del Moore recalled. “That revived me the idea of something to do. And we carried our trunk to the edge of the lake. …
“And there began a test of our endurance. William B. Ogden’s great lumberyard of hard wood seasoned by five years’ exposure burned all day, pouring the hot smoke on us and cut off as we were by fire at the north, but there was no way but to bear as best we could.
“If suffocation seemed inevitable, we could go out into the lake and drown. … My fear left me and I looked on drowning as a salvation.