The Great Fire of Eighteen Thirty-One

The Fayetteville that exists today is, to a remarkable degree, a city that rebuilt itself after a single afternoon.

On May twenty-ninth, eighteen thirty-one, a Sunday, a fire started in a kitchen on the northwest corner of Market Square. The cook lost control of the stove. Within hours the fire had spread across the center of town. By the time it was extinguished, more than six hundred buildings had burned: hundreds of homes, a school, two hotels, one hundred five stores, two banks, and nearly every church in the city.

By some accounts it was one of the worst urban fires in American history up to that point. Remarkably, no deaths were recorded in direct connection to the fire itself.

News of the disaster spread quickly for the eighteen thirties. Private donations poured in from across the country, more than one hundred thousand dollars collected and distributed to the residents of Fayetteville. The city rebuilt, and it rebuilt in brick. The structures that had burned were mostly wood. What replaced them were the brick buildings that define historic downtown today, including the Market House, completed in eighteen thirty-two on the site of the old State House.

There is a particular quality to cities that have been almost entirely destroyed and then rebuilt in a short span. The architecture becomes uniform in a way it might not otherwise. Downtown Fayetteville has that quality. You are essentially looking at an eighteen thirties city, rebuilt rapidly after catastrophe, with a particular aesthetic coherence that comes from disaster rather than from planning.

The fire erased a city. The city that rose from it is the one you are driving through now.