The Great Chicago Fire, What Actually Burned and Who Didn't

The fire started on the night of October eighth, eighteen seventy-one, somewhere in the vicinity of DeKoven Street on the city's Near West Side. It burned for thirty-six hours. By the time it was out, three-point-three square miles of the city were ash, seventeen thousand structures were gone, approximately ninety thousand people were homeless, and somewhere between two hundred and three hundred people were dead. Chicago in eighteen seventy-one was a city of wood: wood-frame houses, wood-plank sidewalks, wood warehouses along the river. It was also a city that had not had significant rain in weeks. The fire moved faster than people could run.

Within days of the fire, the city's newspapers had decided on a cause and a culprit. A cow owned by a woman named Catherine O'Leary had kicked over a lantern in her barn at one thirty-seven DeKoven Street, and the lantern had ignited the straw, and the city had burned. The story had everything a satisfying scandal needed: an immigrant woman, an Irish immigrant specifically, an animal, and an act of carelessness that stood in for something larger. The problem with the story was that it was invented. The reporter who wrote it, a Chicago Tribune correspondent named Michael Ahern, later admitted he had made it up.

O'Leary spent the rest of her life in humiliation. She was not a wealthy woman. She was not a powerful woman. She was a working-class Irish immigrant on the Near West Side who had the misfortune to live near where the fire started. She became a recluse. She refused public appearances. The mockery followed her to her death in eighteen ninety-five. The City of Chicago did not formally exonerate her until nineteen ninety-seven, one hundred and twenty-six years after the fire.

What actually caused the fire remains unknown. Multiple theories have been advanced, including that a neighbor of O'Leary's accidentally started it, and at least one researcher has proposed a comet fragment as the origin. None has been proven. The cause is an open question in the historical record.

What is not in question is what happened next. Chicago rebuilt within two years. The pressure of reconstruction on scarce urban land forced architects to rethink how buildings could be made: taller, in steel and stone. The first modern skyscrapers emerged from this rubble. The city the Irish immigrant woman was blamed for burning became the city that invented the modern skyline.