In mid-January 1872, working-class North Siders protested against Chicago Mayor Joseph Medill’s plan to outlaw the construction of wooden buildings everywhere inside the city limits. Many of these protesters were German immigrants. The most prominent Chicagoan speaking out against Medill's plan was Anton C. Hesing, publisher of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung.

Pictured: The sculpture of Hesing at his grave in St. Boniface Cemetery.

As of Nov. 25, 1871, the Chicago Relief and Aid Society’s Bureau of Special Relief had helped 1,525 families. This was a special effort to help people “who were the least accustomed to deprivation and hardship,” who “would perish rather than appear as the recipients of public bounty.”

On Nov. 24, 1871, the Chicago Board of Police and Fire Commissioners heard more testimony in its investigation of the Great Chicago Fire.

The day’s third witness was Catherine O’Leary—or Leary, as her named was recorded in the transcript. O’Leary had an infant in her arms on the witness stand. That was apparently her youngest child, Patrick William O’Leary (who was born around 1871, if later census documents are correct).

On Nov. 23, 1871, the Chicago Board of Police and Fire Commissioners began taking testimony for its investigation of the Great Chicago Fire. Only two of the commission’s three members showed up. Other officials were “otherwise engaged,” the Tribune reported.

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.

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. …

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. …

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."

Associated Press dispatch from “Englewood, Ten Miles from Chicago,” at 11 a. m. Monday, Oct. 9, 1871:

“The work of destruction continues. More than one-half of the city is already destroyed, and the flames continue their ravages almost unopposed.” (This report mistakenly suggested that the Chicago Tribune’s “fireproof” building had survived the conflagration.)

Meanwhile, on the Sands …

“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.

Dispatch from Chicago at 10:40 a.m. Monday, Oct. 9, 1871, published in the Madison Daily Democrat:

“The most extensive fire ever known here now is raging in this city. … “The fire is spreading rapidly in all directions, making a clear sweep along its course. The firemen have actually lost control over the fire. …

Associated Press report from New York, Oct. 9, 1871:

“Great crowds are assembled at the bulletin boards and in public places eagerly seeking additional news from the Chicago conflagration. … “A feeling of pain is visible upon the faces of the crowds gathered at newspaper bulletins in search of particulars. Newspaper bulletins were issued at about 11:30 a.m., containing the news, and were rapidly sold in large numbers.”

The Reverend Martin Stamm ventured out from First Evangelical Church on Clark Street between Van Buren and Polk … Stamm: "At 9 o’clock on Monday morning, I made a trip to Clark Street. … At a point three to four blocks north of Polk Street, a number of dry goods stores and clothing stores were on fire. …

A boy named Justin was also trapped on the Sands with his family. A letter he wrote (addressed "Dear Chum") is in the @ChicagoMuseum collection. It's believed that the writer was Justin Butterfield, the 12-year-old son of a bank clerk who lived on Illinois Avenue. @ChicagoMuseum "We got along very well until the Pestigo [sic] Lumber yard caught on fire then it was all we could do to breathe," Justin told his friend. …

Adele “Del” Moore, 30, lived at Indiana and Pine (now Grand and Michigan) with her husband, Gus. Along with many neighbors, they’d taken refuge on the Sands, the stretch of lakefront north of the Chicago River. Now, they were trapped on the Sands.

Harry Rubens, a reporter for the German-language St. Louis newspaper Westliche Post, arrived in Chicago on an Illinois Central train at 7 a.m. Oct. 9, 1871. Unable to take passengers all the way downtown, the train let everyone off at 22nd Street. Rubens managed to get a ride on a “Springwagen” for $3 and headed toward Chicago’s chaotic center. “The turmoil, the misery, and the shouting for help took on more and more horrific dimensions. and it seemed as if the ‘end of the world’ had come,” he wrote.

Sunrise in Chicago on Monday, Oct. 9, 1871 … Cordelia Kirkland: “A new sight soon struck my eye. What in the world was that dark, lurid, purplish ball that hung before me, constantly changing its appearance, like some fiendish face making grimaces at our misery? I looked and looked, and turned away, and looked again. …

Sometime around sunrise on Oct. 9, 1871, another wave of fire approached the Chicago Tribune Building.”I went back to the roof and told the men the battle was lost,” Joseph Medill later recalled. … “Going downstairs, we made a hasty search of the rooms and found some of the employees utterly exhausted lying in the eastern rooms, which were the coolest and least exposed.

Many North Siders were fleeing into Lincoln Park, which was slowly being transformed during those years from the old City Cemetery into a park. Aurelia King: “There among the empty graves of the old cemetery we sat down, and threw down our bundles until we were warned to flee once more. The dry leaves and even the very ground took fire beneath our feet.”

After returning downtown from the waterworks, the fire marshal went to his own residence, on Randolph Street. Williams found his wife “all ready to go,” and asked police officers and firefighters to help him save some of his personal belongings. Willams later testified: "Said I, 'Will you help take down this piano of mine?' Went up there, and the boys were going to take it out just as it was. I commenced unscrewing the legs. …

Samuel Stone was in the Chicago Historical Society’s building at the northwest corner of Ontario and Dearborn Streets, where he was the assistant librarian.

Picture: chicagology.com/prefire/prefir… As fire struck at 3 a.m., he tried to save Abraham Lincoln’s final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, known as the Chicago Historical Society’s most precious possession.