The Great Fire of 1866
Near Portland, Maine
On the afternoon of July fourth, eighteen sixty-six, while Portlanders were celebrating Independence Day, a fire started on Commercial Street, most likely from a firecracker or a discarded cigar. It caught at John Bundy Brown's sugarhouse on Maple Street, found a strong wind, and began to run.
By the time it burned itself out in the early hours of July fifth, Portland had suffered one of the most destructive fires in American history to that time. Eighteen hundred structures destroyed. Twelve hundred of them were homes. Ten thousand people, roughly half the city's population, were left without shelter the morning after the fire, wealthy merchants standing next to day laborers in the same rubble.
What the fire took was staggering: the new City Hall, the Customs House, the Post Office, every bank in the city, dozens of hotels and commercial blocks, several churches including the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which was still under construction. The Federal Government sent tents, and a makeshift tent city went up on Munjoy Hill. Boston sent food by rail. Blankets and supplies arrived by rail from Montreal, Ottawa, and Sherbrooke in Canada.
Portland rebuilt almost completely within two years. That speed had consequences still visible today. Because the reconstruction happened so fast, and because architects from Boston and New York and Canada rushed in to take commissions, the rebuilt city is remarkably unified in character. Most of the new commercial buildings went up in Italianate and Second Empire styles, in brick and granite. The result is the Old Port district you see now, a coherent Victorian streetscape that is not a museum piece but a living neighborhood that has been continuously occupied since eighteen sixty-eight.
The Great Fire predated the Great Chicago Fire by five years. Portland, as usual, got there first.
