you're right that possible that he had some kind of adhd and that he out of it maybe that's something that you were probably know more about than i do but good point. just in that same line of questioning, i from what i've read his father was kind of a party boy too. you are correct. and did you know, didn't really take george in education too seriously. so i don't know if that was just martha's or because i mean, i sort of i think it was ron chernow spoke it sort of the pattern was repeated. you know, martha's you're right. thank you for mentioning. see so john parke custis was a student in new york city at king's college, which became columbia and was the same drill washington was writing to him. so why should you remember? had no formal education. so he was desperate for these adopted sons. first, john parke custis and then his son washi to output form him. and it must have been so disappointing him when they all he wanted to do was party, you know. so. so what you think is that all? well, i enjoyed it very much. you. i good evening. welcome to the boston public local history lecture series. as part our program, we want to read the following statement to bring attention to the land we use for our buildings and events, we acknowledge that the boston public library's central library stands on land that was once a water ecosystem, providing sustenance for the indigenous massachusetts people and as a place which has served as a site of meeting an exchange nations, we are to land acknowledgments for all locations which we operate. we reaffirm this commitment to set the context, planning, deliberations and public engagement which will take place in the spirit of welcome and respect. found in our motto free to all tonight. we are very pleased to have stephanie schorow here to talk her book, the great boston fire the inferno that nearly incinerated the city stephanie schorow is a journalist, writing instructor and, the author of eight nonfiction books, a variety of topics in boston history. they include the coconut grove, inside the combat zone, drinking in boston, history of the city and its spirits and recovery for the boston mob guard. her novel, cat dreaming, will be in 2023. she shares her home in medford with two cats that like to walk on her keyboard. she's typing. questions will be taken at the of the lecture and please come up to the mikes if you feel comfortable. the program is being recorded. thanks for coming and enjoy the lecture. greetings. good evening. good to see everybody here and thanks for coming out to this lecture for the on the great fire the inferno that nearly incinerated the can you tell i worked for the boston herald at one point from there had so as as diane first of all i want to thank the boston library for having me here. diane libraries are, great institutions, this one in particular. and you talk a little bit about how my research supported by this library things i found here and so i just really want to have a little acknowledgment for the role of libraries in our life but as dan said, i've written a number of books on boston history here. some of them fires crime, drinking and pornography. criminals, all the good stuff. in other words you know, i'll leave the puritans in the revolution is for other people but i like to write about different aspects of history and the way people live their lives. so let me talk about this book. i've actually about the this 1872 fire before in one of my previous books but i wanted to return to it in time for the. 150th anniversary of the fire which is today tomorrow and the next day we're right at 150 years. so the always becomes every every time i do a lecture, they say, well, why did you get this subject? what is it about it? and i'll be very blunt, the scale, the mass scale of this fire, if you look at pictures of it you will see this is downtown crossing the way and you recognize filene's or of course, that's long gone. but the point is that the scale this fire was so massive and so extensive that, it amazed me that more people don't know about today we all know about other big fires, but we don't know about this fire. and so i wanted to return to this fire and tell a little bit more its history because i found it and like many historical books, there, many side stories that run off the main story that i was able to cover in this book and. that's kind of the reason. one of the reasons i wanted to return to it. but here's the thing about this big fire. basically, a big fire happened 150 years ago. there are lessons that we can extrapolate and learn for today. history is never dead. it's it's it's not really even the past is never dead as faulkner said, it's not even past. we continue to learn from actions that have happened. 100, 150, 200 years ago. and the same is true. this fire to put a little bit in context. boston had a lot of fires. it was said that boston was built to burn by one other author, as a matter of fact. so we can look at this fire in the context of other fires in the city. i'd like to sort of set the stage as well about what boston was like in the in 1872. it was a city of about 250,000 people. it was a port city, very busy commerce activity. not only had the universities but it was a center for the sale and export of wholesale goods manufacturing. there were factories, many of which were in the downtown area. it the city, of course was very jealous of its we still are about a position as the athens of america that we are the bed of a lot of reforms of liberty and other things important in american history, particularly in the social justice, social such as women's suffrage and animal welfare, which i'm going to talk about in a bit now, the downtown area. and by that i mean, that area we now call crossing the basically the intersection of winter streets this area prior to 1872 had been kind of a neighborhood big homes, gracious homes. but by this time, starting a little before and then after the civil war, it become became more of a commercial area packed with warehouses and small factories and off buildings and merchants and other storage facilities. it those new buildings, even the warehouses were, built to be homages to the forces of capitalism. they didn't just put up buildings, they put up granite impressive granite structures with a lot of embellishment, such as mansard roofs. these particular kind of roofs that were on the top of the building. and they had a lot of architectural frills. so was meant to be a place that showcased boston as a area of and commercialism. now at the time the boston fire department was considered to be of the best in the country. it was had a mixture of full time employees volunteers part time and well trained. many of the the men. and they were all men at that time who were in the fire department, who had been in the fire service for many years their fathers before them. they had top quality t equipment, which were the fire engines, maybe not the very top, but close to the top of steam powered fire engines, like the one pictured here. and that they were horses were used to draw these engines. they would burn wood or coal to generate enough pressure and steam to get water on the tops of buildings. that's the best way to fight a fire from water from the top down. and so it was considered a very well equipped, very well-trained ah service. however, however there were a number of infrastructure flaws. for example in this downtown area. the system that supported the, the fire system was aging, the water mains had been put in installed when it was at roosevelt area of one or two story buildings. but now there are 4 to 5, six story buildings and the water couldn't just get enough water into machines to get a stream high enough, get on top of those new buildings. plus the water mains were aging. they were rusting, so they were corroding. there were smaller and smaller. there were not as many fires. stations in the downtown area as you would think, given the amount of wealth that was concentrated in this area. and i mentioned those mansard roofs, there were wood and they were very flammable in the fire chief called them elevated lumber yards. and so see how that played out in the fire. there was also some issue with fire hydrants and that they were not updated as they could have been. so there were a number structural problems and the thing is the city knew about it or should known about it thanks to the work. this gentleman, john stammers, who is the chief engineer and that's what they called him, the engineer, the boston fire department. it was an elected position. he'd been elected to it some years earlier, and he was determined to. boston, one of the best and most safest cities from fire of he could possibly do he very much involved with building he was a builder himself he was carpenter. he'd been a volunteer firefighter. so he knew how to build buildings and he knew how they could burn down. so was determined to talk the city over the years about how the city could be made safer. so in his annual reports of 1867, 1868, 1869. he continually complained that needed more water better mains in the area, more firehouses. those mansard roofs should go and that were many other problems that should be taken care of in the city to make it safe. but what happened? he found out he was he was found out that city officials considered him someone to not bring them, but simply do what they told him to do. and in fact, when he brought up his concerns about the lack of water he was told point blank, do not try to magnify wants of your department or of your office. so much. in other words, we now we know, but you just want more money. you don't need it. it's we'll we'll be fine. now, this is the problem, though. while the city was very proud, their fire department and they they just couldn't bring it upon themselves to spend for the department an editorial in a newspaper in fact said what does it matter if one fire engine gets there before another fire engine. it doesn't matter it will be put out one way or the other. this was the kind of attitude daniel was constantly railing against something else to keep in context. in the 19th century around this time, there were many urban conflagrations or big fires. but the american cities were really, in a sense, burning down. that's because they'd been built very quickly. the civil war, many of the buildings were built very close together, very high. there wasn't a lot of attention to zoning, to safe building materials. so there are major fires in many cities around the country, including chicago. now, you know about the chicago fire, don't you? we all know that mrs. o'leary's cow. and late last night, when i was, you know, you sang at a camp, didn't you? well i did. i grew up in chicago, so we sang and we all knew about mrs. o'leary's cow. but what when this fire happened in. 71, october 1871, it sent a chill through urban firefighters all around the united states. they were concerned that what happened in chicago maybe it could happen in their city. in fact daniel a few days after fire took a train to chicago to deliver money that was raised by his department for chicago firefighter but also to find out what happened and what he found chilled him. he looked at chicago and he said to himself and he said later the boston city, what happened there could happen here. we really to take new measures to protect the and again the city listened to them and said yes, yes, course, of course. but nothing was done. the only thing that did get was a fire boat. he wanted to get a new fire boat that would take water from the wharfs, from the ocean right outside the city and use it to put it on fire. and he got it went into service a month after. the fire. so there was this feeling about the great boston fire that it was a feeling among the city, a big fire could just not here that this city was too well served by its firefighters and didn't need to spend a lot of money. now, let me tell you one other story, which i think is interesting, again, this is a side story off the main story about this fire. and that is about the great course epizootics a pandemic for equines. now, i was always interested this this event, if you will, this this this pandemic. but i was writing this book during, our pandemic. so i was very interested in to look at what's happening back in 1872. so as you know, at that time, no cars there were trains, horses pulled everything. horses were the main source of transportation from trolleys in the city to pulling wagons to pulling carriages. and so when mr. priestly in october of 1872, they falling sick horse of the transportation system the of north america began to grind to a halt. what happened is flu and we now know a flu. at the time it was very mysterious, didn't know what was going on. the flu started in canada and started to spread to city to city and finally came to boston. and what is when the horses fell sick, they didn't necessarily die, but they were too sick to work and for horse not to able to work. they had to be pretty sick indeed. and the reason this was mysterious is because the horses days later they would get sick. and we now know how viruses are transmitted and passed from horse. the horse a horse could be infectious without showing any symptoms. and this may sound familiar, but they didn't know that at the time. so as the horses sick in cities, men moved in to take their place. and you can see that with the being used to pull wagons, pull trolleys and in some cases the horses did get sick enough to die, which was a terrible blow to people who depended on horses to make a living. what's very interesting about this particular among horses was how it spread and some a number of people have looked including a professor in canada who i interviewed who charted the of this this flu with any mapped to the railroads. so you can see the railroad roads that go across. work forget it see how the railroads spread the disease. and that's because the horses seemed to be healthy. they were loaded on trains. they were taken to another city, bingo. they get sick. and by that time they'd already infected other horses. so the horse moved across the country. it was it was dead. it was over with in about year. and here's the thing we still don't know to this day what actually it we know it was some kind of virus, some kind of flu. but it is never reappeared. never reappeared. couple of reasons. horses developed immunity to it or we stopped horses. but one thing it did do was raise some issues about protection, animal safety and in fact, in my in the course of my doing my research on this, i found a lot of material from angel roger angel, who eventually angel hospital, the veterinarian hospital, he had a newsletter that he put out and i found a lot of accounts in that about horses and how people were trying very hard to protect these horses and get them. well and this illustration, which i believe is by thomas nast, not signed, but thomas nast, i'll show you another cartoon of his later on. but he was a very famous cartoonist at the time. now, here's the deal. the problem with the horse flu was not just in transportation getting around the city, but it had a real impact on public safety. and that that the fire engines of the day were pulled by horses. they were quite heavy and specially trained horses had to be mobilized, had to be trained and then used to pull them around. now, these horses would would not run away in a fire. they would they would not away when there's sparks or loud noises. but they knew when the bell rang in the fire station to go to their station, the harnesses would fall, would drop on them. and the firefighters take off. so when the horses became sick, it was not it was not a simple task to simply replace them with, well, horses that first of all, there weren't any. well, horses. and second of all, those horses weren't trained. so the fire fighters and dam john daniel gathered his firefighters and said, okay, we've got to have a plan. so we are going to go back to an old of pulling the fire engines by hand. that had been the custom for just a few like a generation earlier before when they were hand pumps they weren't as heavy but now that they were heavy they were using horses. but guess what? we're going to go back to pulling them by hand. so he set up an elaborate system in which men be used to pull the fire engines. if there were problems, he had system where not every engine would out with a alarm. in other words, you try to keep some in reserve so everybody in the city would would be protected and so forth and. for a few months it seemed few weeks, i should say. it seemed to there were no major fires, seemed to be going okay and the horses began to recover by november. so we're going up, let's talk now about start of this fire and people always ask me. someone asked me tonight what was the cause of this fire and a good question, but it's not the right. so there were many in this point of time. american cities are fires happening all the time. what was different about fire was how hot it got, how quickly it spread and how how much it got out of control before firefighters could really rein it in. so we can't look at it as a simple car, as one simple cause and effect, simple spark. it was a systems failure and one aspect of fires that i find very useful to employ for this fire is idea of a system failure or system's response to fire. the national fire protection has actually come up with a life fire and life safety ecosphere. and i when, i first heard about this. i said this explains the great boston fire because was a series of different events caused that it wasn't one single thing. it was a complete encyclopedia of, different causes. so on the night of saturday, november 9th, around 7 p.m., a fire was first seen in the basement of a building. this building here, this representation of it about 7:00, somebody knows there was a fire in the basement of this building. now, this was a merchant's building. there was a small factory. it was filled with wholesale wholesale materials, close hoop skirts from women, leather goods. and when fire was seen in the basement. there was, of course, consternation, but there weren't a lot of people around. remember, was now a commercial area? it was saturday night. it was dark. so most of the area was deserted. but people did see the fire and try get help. but there was a delay in sending out the message at this time in the area, the city was served by a series of alarm boxes, fire alarm telegraph boxes. and these are boxes we still have them today. there's a fire boxes that you see. they probably have some in here where at the time. you open it and you crank it and it would send a message to telegraph to a central headquarters for for the alarm to fire alarm headquarter. the fire alarm would see where the boxes is because they got the signal. then they would ring bells in the city to indicate number of the box. for example, if box two was triggered, the fire alarm headquarters would ring out five rings and two rings. five rings and two rings and represent two. and many of the firefighters, including john dream, really knew where every box in the city was. he knew where 52 was. he knew where 51 was. he knew where all these were. so there was one problem with the system. it worked pretty well because the fire alarm headquarters would not only send out a signal the where the fire was, it also send a signal to the individual houses. you know, this is your work. you're responsible. box 52, get out there. but happened there was a delay and that was because there's a flaw in the system. these boxes were kept locked and that was because the there was a fear about false alarms so near every box in the city was a citizen wasn't was nearby with a key and all policemen had keys this box to the boxes in the city. but there was a delay in finding a police officer to open the box and crank the alarm and send out the signal so if you can imagine it, about 7:00 fire was seen, the first alarm did not go until 724, then there was a second alarm. a second alarm would bring in more equipment. a third alarm would bring out more fire companies and say, hey, get over. and then the fourth alarm would send every company in the city to this location. but there was a delay. you can see it was quite a delay in getting to this fire. and by that time it had consumed that the building and was spreading to other buildings -- well heard box 52 ring from his house hilltop beacon hill. he heard it he knew that was a bad area. he grabbed his helmet and his ax and he literally to where the box was and what he saw there made him realize that his worst fears were coming to pass the fire started spreading spread up summer street it spread roofed the roof because of those mansard roofs. firefighters in the initial period would set a position and they would start getting water on it and then water would run out because they just didn't have enough water in the mains to get their engines to get on the fire. so you can see it, you can kind of get a sense of that. you can look at this illustration and show them desperately trying to get water on the top of the but not up high enough. one thing i should mention right away, there are no photographs of the fire, but we have plenty of illustrations because it was a big in the newspapers of the day. so this is a kind of a pretty illustration of what happened and you can see not only was there a problem with getting water on it, but there was a problem. crowd control people rushed out to see fire. people were trying to get material from their build it from their stores to get it out of the way. it was a kind of a mess trying to control everything. one thing that's very interesting is that were there was a lot of coverage of the fires and. a lot of reporters use one expression, fire fiend. they called it the fire fiend. and you see that repeated over and over again in the way they looked at the fire this a map done for documentary about this fire that kind of shows it spread. and you can see where it started in the lower part of the screen. there started about 7 to 8:00 in this area. and then just spread. firefighters were continually to get water on it. the water would run out. they were besieged. a number of problems. one of which was the granite, those beautiful buildings. granite has little pockets of air in it. so it was exploding. basically, buildings were explode around the city and the granite was there was chunks of granite flaming, falling on the firefighters and you could see it burned right to the right to the wall were burned right to the wharfs there, burnt the wharfs. and in fact, if there was an ocean, london would have burned because it so hot. you may trying to figure out where that is. oh, here's another view of it from the air showing the chunk of the city was affected by the fire. and if you're trying to look at where it is today, this is a map, the old map, things are we have more landfill into harbor. but this is roughly area of the city where the fire. some of the logistical were, again, the mansard roofs, the fire spread roof to roof. so it's almost impossible for firefighters get water on those roofs and control it. the fire became so hot it would literally material across the street or cross a barrier this is what a classic conflagration is when things get so hot so that that it was very hard to to kind of mount a defense for it. and again you can see from these illustrations how there was a desperate struggle to get as much water and get as many engines into the area as possible and get as much water on the buildings as possible. cloud crowd control. as i said, a real problem. many of the merchants who rushed they heard there was a fire, were trying to get the material from their buildings out. and when they couldn't get it out, they could see the fire coming. they started giving away so that had people who were looting and. you had people who were just being given free stuff and were escaping with. and this caused many other problems in terms law enforcement and control of the situation here. for example is a an illustration of street before the fire and. here's an illustration of it during the fire. the fire was so big and so hot it could be seen from about 50 miles away on from the ocean. it created its own wind. it became so hot. it was like its own little hurricane that moved the city and this photo may seem like an exaggeration, but a lot of people described how big this fire was and how massive it looked from the city now of many of the fire fighters did the best they could. but there were, of course, citizens and many politics who conveniently forgot what daryl had told them, who rushed in and demanded that he do something. and one of the things that they demanded he do was to create firebreaks with the use of gunpowder power powder, in other words, blow up, create fireblocks is this is a common firefighting technique, but it is very to do in a in an urban setting like this general under pressure to, quote, do something. and he deputized some citizens to go out and blow up buildings. well, that was a mistake. the people were a little bit indiscriminate in it in terms of blowing things up. and one other interesting rupture problem, the city this time was lit by gas gas. gas mains. they created the lights that everybody use. there was there were candles of course. but now they use gas. well gas could not be turned block by block. the gas that fed the city could only be turned off at the main headquarters of the gas company. and it was difficult to find. someone to get into the spilled into the gas building to turn off. so what would happen is that people would blow up buildings gas would continue to flow out it would pull in when ignite and it would spread the fire. general finally had to send his men to say, stop using gunpowder. if you've used more gunpowder, i'll have you arrested. and if not, i'll have you thrown jail. just a word about the firefighters they face. if saw that picture of that huge blaze against sky, you must realize just they were up against and these this the time there was very little protective gear they had helmets and they had coats, but there was very little else between them and they were calling the fire field. and this very dramatic picture, which was the cover of harper's weekly kind of captures that there are many witnesses, this fire and including someone who said the red glare the strange were the flying people all made the night terrible and i kept thinking of the last days of pompeii and that was louisa may alcott william lloyd the famous abolitionist he too went out to see fire in fact i'll tell you something funny about william lloyd garrison. he was a bit of a spark. you mean he was one of those people who like to go out and watch fires? and so he would often he writes about dragging a sun out at night to go watch fires. but he watched this fire and then graham bell, like many other people of the time, rushed out to try to help. he wrote up. he describes writing up his account of the fire, what he did how he tried to fight it. he sent to the boston globe to be printed guess what? they never printed it so it's lost to history as as we can tell one thing that general did which very smart is very early in the fire he knew we had a had had a major conflagration on his hand so we had telegraph sent to fire companies all over the state all around boston and anywhere within. 20 miles of the city. in other words, sent messages to hampshire, to connecticut and to maine. and so companies as far as way of our ways, bill ford, maine came down to this to help fight it. many of them loaded their engines on trains are still running and they trained into the city. and so it was a true effort by firefighters from throughout new england to try to save the city. one of the companies, they would give them names in those days was a company called the kearsarge, which is from portsmouth, new hampshire. and it came down the the train and the men came came down by train and they are credited with saving the old south meeting house, which is one of the most historic buildings in it was threatened many people thought it would be burning but they managed to get on it and preserve it. so eventually the fire was put out with these additional men, additional demel was able to amass his men on the perimeter create a perimeter for the fire and. hold it back. i mean, the rest of it just burned. but he was able to hold it there the. fire actually was out sunday night, but it started. but another actually was out by but another part of it ignited late sunday night. so technically the whole fire was not out until monday. firefighters worked day and into the next. keeping it going. here's a picture of a fire engine. it's still running steam is they're probably still putting water on some of the burned areas of the fire and. what happened was that on monday morning, boston awoke to scenes of incredible destruction of their city. this is a general view of the of how the had spread. and this is the tally. 776 buildings were burned and more than 60 acres about. 220,000 people were left jobless. there are millions of dollars of of consigned goods and other of goods that was destroyed. 11 firefighters and one former firefighter were killed. there might even be 12 firefighters. it's a little unclear. and the damage was in today's dollars. in today's dollars, it would be well over $1.6 billion for everything. that's today's figures it making it per acre one of the most expensive fires in in u.s. history. but here's the thing. and it's and when look at these pictures, the destruction you wonder about this but there was not a high loss of life probably between 20 to 30 people. and the firefighters were killed. we don't know the exact number of people killed that recorded. many things were recorded, but not that in particular. we have names of the firefighters. that's very clear of who who died. but the civilian casualties is a bit unclear. i've seen different and different names. i've tried correlate them. but it's interesting. boston at the time did not see did in any way record everybody who was killed. but it was a huge huge story around the country this is an illustration by thomas nast again the cartoon is who created the elephant and the donkey for our as are symbols our political parties. this is his work here and you'll notice the headline there long headline but see the words chicago repeated because that's the story of the great boston fire. it was a disaster foretold. daniel had gone to chicago said came back and said it could happen here and guess what it was. now one of the interesting things about the of this fire was its use in terms of what you would call the popular media of day photographers rushed into the the city to get photographs and you can see them you can see lot of their work right here at the through the website the boston public library has a lot of them on display. and i would urge you to look through of those some of these images. they are amazing. they are stark. they are dramatic. and they capture the sense of destruction of the city. an almost beautiful lyrical imagery. here's this here's another one here of that actually shows people posing with this scene that looks something out of the ruins, the of the roman empire. there was a couple of purposes for these for these photographs. one is that they were sent the actual physical photograph was sent to newspapers all around the world. and the idea was that they were they were used to print images in the newspapers, newspapers, those time or magazines not print photos. there was just not the technology. but they had illustrators on hand who would take these images and turn them into illustrations. you can see on the right hand side is the illustration of. the photo, which is on the left and you can see how they they took these photos and did a pretty good job in terms of reproduced seeing it for newspaper audience as many of the photographers created panoramas because they were really trying grab to get sense of this mass destruction the city william lloyd garrison was gifted photographic of the fire probably something like this this big camera panorama and he was delighted by it he just thought it was the greatest thing. i didn't want i wouldn't want to hang it in my house. but he was very delighted but there was another commercial opportunity and that was for something. stereo stereoscope. stereoscope cards and these were cards that if you had a view-master as a kid you could get this 3-d effect with using a double image in a device, something like this. and you would take your photo your card, you put it here and look through it. and you you still to this day can get a 3-d image out of that. and people victorian eyes love this. they thought this was and so there were dozens, dozens of these cards made. i got all these from ebay, by the way, but there were hundreds made up. and, you know, when i first started collecting them, i thought, this is gruesome. why would anybody want to look at these horrible pictures of destruction i mean, i could see they'd want to look at scenery. they might want to look at places in greece or bucolic scenes. but no, they really liked to look at scenes of utter destruction. and then i thought about and i said, you know, have i been to the movies lately? every time i go to a movie, something's blown up and everything gets blown up in the movies. little scenes of destruction in a very popular show. it's interesting that this impulse to see destroy action is manifest in. a victorian in victorian as it is today. another side light was the selling of of relics. and it's funny because went to speak at the bear cove fire museum in hingham and it turns out they had a box of material that was left over from the fire, including these letters. now the businesses course, many of them were totally ruined, but a lot of them pick themselves up, went to the site of their former business businesses, put in signs that said, hey, we're not here anymore, but you can find us somewhere. and would continue on with their businesses. there was a rush of what you might call disaster tourism. a lot of people would view the ruins and. many of the businesses that went in there would look for their safes because that was the main thing that they wanted to get. sure they wanted they knew all the material was destroyed, but they want to see if their safes, with all their important papers and maybe some money survived. and most of them did not. but number of them did survive. and in fact, this publication which came out about ten days after the fire, which is about the whole process, includes an ad for morris in ireland. safes and with testimonials that my you're safe protected my important papers we were able to open it after the fire and by god it was all so buy go ahead and buy morrison ireland safes and i think they they may still make them today so i was about this in charlestown and someone said, oh yeah we have a morris in ireland saved in a building there. boston rebuilt very i think that's one of the reasons we don't know much about it. there was a concerted effort to get insurance monies. many, many of these businesses were covered by insurance and not 100% that 80%. and boston in couple of years rebuilt. it didn't do much to straighten out the streets. the downtown area, they kind of built on the same footprint. and rushford putting this all them. there was, however, a commission because this is boston we our commissions to study of the fire and they had many of testimony about foreign including john dowd merrill and to discover what caused the fire and what could be done preventing the future. but they did have a culprit they wanted to blame for this fire can guess who it was john general got brunt for a lot of what went on it was it was said that he acted too much as a foot soldier and not as much a general. and so he was blamed for a lot of it. his men, however, supported and told, said there was nothing he did the best he could. he did a great job. he saved the city. so in the aftermath of this fire there, after a while, it didn't happen right away. but after a while there's a attention to zoning, to building issues and to improvements in the water system. it took a lot longer than you think, but eventually there a better control of the water mains in that area and the effort to create better built to prevent the fire, prevent fires, not just fight them, but to prevent them. were undertaken -- role played. a part in that other men would kind of licked their wounds and gone off in a corner. but he stuck it out. was state he was reelected the the fire fire chief but then they reorganized the department again they're blaming him for things. he quit and he could have run off, but he decided to stay in. public safety. he helped to found the international association of fire chiefs, which to this day and in 1877, he became, the chief of the city department building, basically the building inspector for the city, and he was in that position for next 25 years, and he stuck out trying again and to make the city safer. he had a role in establishing the national model building code and. he died in 1905. his son became, commissioner, this is a picture of his grave in the fire. the firefighters in forest hill cemetery. and let me tell you a couple more interesting little tidbits about the aftermath this fire. one was the kearsarge. you know, that engine i talked about that came down from portsmouth. well, that was actually preserved through a series of circumstances. it rusted for a long time. but finally, in russia for a long time in a shed. but it was pulled out restart re re rebuilt and we brought it to boston in 2010. we brought boston fire historical society brought it back to the old south meeting house, put it right outside the building. it may have been a more than a hundred years ago. at that time, and it caused quite hit in the downtown area and the machine is now back at in the portsmouth fire department, not much of the fire remains today. i mean, so many people walk through downtown crossing, have no idea what went on there. there is the box 50 to remains and it's actually labeled box 52. and as a special light on top of it. and then, of course, the old south still stands and there is a fire boat. fire boat was commissioned in 2011 and it's called the john esther. and this is another picture of the fire boat, one thing i might kind conclude with is the idea of continual problems. fire in the 19th century, it was cities that were burning down. but today we're fires in the wildland areas. that intersection between wilderness areas and and cities or towns. so i like to say that the fire has not disappeared is just taken a different. one last thing i have a new book i did a rewrite of my book on, the coconut grove fire. a lot of you are probably remember that and that is coming is just just right now and it again at a past fire and draws lessons that we can we can learn we can still repeat that bear repeating for so again to emphasize the great boston fire was a disaster for told but people chose to not pay attention to the lessons that d'amaro was trying to present. and my suggestion is that in the future we listen to people who are trying to warn us of possible disasters, whether it's fire, whether it's a possible pandemic or another cause. so i'd like to stop there and see if anybody has any questions. please come up. if you have any questions, i think do we have microphone for them? no microphone. okay. so if you'd like to come down to speak your questions or just stand out, yell it out and i'll try to answer it. so thank you very much for. so who has quick some questions are there any questions here in the audience. about the fire or how many people have heard heard about this fire before this how people knew about it? okay. all right. i see. hand over there. what was your question? i was just curious if dan rail to see the code b and promoted or if he died prior to that? yeah. the question was whether dan got to see code. the national building safety code published? no, he died died before that, but he was very much involved. he saw what was coming down down the pike. but. but unfortunately, he died before a lot of the reforms that he wanted were instituted around the country. but he was is founding international association of fire. that was a big thing because like i said, that's still going on today. and he's still honored for for that organization. so any any questions? yes. yes, ma'am. are there any memorials in the area to the fire, the question? the question is, are there any memorials to the fire in the area? actually, we not really there. there were some plaques up on some of the buildings in downtown town area. and i think there are a few of still left. but there was one near where the fire started. but last time i was there, i didn't see it. so again, it's not very well known there. not many areas that out where it was or, what happened on the spot. there may be a few tucked away or there were plaques in on the for example, the ten on the 50th year anniversary and on the 100th year anniversary, there was a lot more attention to this fire fact in 1972, on the 100th anniversary of the fire, the boston globe came out with a very special section all about this fire. but hasn't been any very little beyond. so it's really something that is being lost to history that this this happened. so thank you for the question i see a hand in the back do you want to yell out your question, sir? how did it start? how did it start? it's okay. here we go so fire was seen in the of a building and some history in king's entry was seen in the basement. there's a furnace in the basement. the speculation is that sparks from the first furnace managed to ignite some combustible material there. it caught it, this material. and then it rushed up a chimney. there was a kind of a chimney in fire, sort of kind of rushed up the chimney. and that's why the fire began to burn. the the manager of sort of the custodian of the building had left just a little before 7:00. and he said everything was in order. so he basically the fire checked the furnace and and locked up for the day. so he didn't see anything. so whatever happened it was, it was not arson. it was not a sort of a structural flaw. it was a probably errant spark that started in the basement and then spread. i think one of the writers, the said from small things come great events. so it was it was something to that effect effect. yes sir you. you mentioned that there was a pretty slow response to the actual fire with of the loss of the right. do you know what the typical response time far this time so would vary on on on. like for example from the one of the companies to the fire was there in about 5 minutes so when we're talking response time there a there was first company on the scene came it was there only it only took about 5 minutes to get there but because they were pulling their equipment, it probably of the horses bringing it, it probably cut it by about 1 to 2 minutes. so the response would have been maybe 3 minutes. and now it was 5 minutes. many the actually it's interesting because we actually have a pretty good record of when fire companies respond to this fire and they started coming almost immediately but but but the fire was so burned so fast and spread so rapidly. and they had such problems in getting it taken care of, like because of the water system that really got out of control. the initial response could have been better. i mean, that's one thing that when i had a discussion with former fire commissioner paul christian. he said that the one problem was that system that they had for dealing with horses. there probably there should have been instead of 2 to 3 fire engines response at the initial outbreak, it should have been more like five or six given the bad location. and that was one of the things that got out of control. but firefighters could get to fires pretty quickly. and that was the idea of having fire stations around the city. so it would only take them a few minutes in many cases i think i estimated. that one company they usually to a fire in 10 minutes and took them 14 minutes so we're not talking a lot of time but it was enough time to get let the fire go out. it burned pretty quickly and to get out of control. yes, i see. have a question and i'm unclear about the amount of residential versus business that was destroyed and real curious. yeah, the had been more resident, but now it's more commercial downtown. however, there was some residential, so say about 20 to 20% of this downtown area still had housing in it. it was more what call today we call low income housing in words. it was it was poor housing was tenement housing. but there were a fair amount more toward what they call the four hill area. there still buildings of a, i guess, apartment, you would call them where there was people living there. part mostly of an immigrant population. it was perhaps lower lower income levels, which is another reason why we don't know how many people were were died there because those people necessarily counted. but i would say only about 20% of this area was housing, but there was about 20% that was housing in this area. yes, i see. and do you know, is there anything at this point for the mets or the housing stock for this, was there any follow up, did you say about the mansard roof? yes, i think they to discourage the roofs being built out of wood. the mansard style is not so bad as long as you don't use wood. if you some sort of metal or tin something. i think there was a push to get rid of the wooden embellishments and to make them more of less flammable. in other words, to use embellishments that were more a little less using wood material and using something. i was going to say think tin. they had stone but mostly tin at the time there was a push to do that i think they continued to be built for a while. that was it kind of hard to get rid of them but there was, there were there were greater efforts to, to create barriers between buildings. so you wouldn't have the spread of fires between buildings. now there are there are a structural issues, structural safety between buildings. so it doesn't spread as quickly between buildings and was one of the areas any other. yes, sir. on the map showed it looked like the fire spread in one direction rather than evenly from where it started. is there any thought about why that might have happened? well, it was interesting because the because there was not a major wind, you might say. what was cause of wind, but there wasn't a lot of wind the the conditions were not very severe at the time. what is that? the fire created its own wind. and so it was able to spread sort of in that northerly direct and kind of with its general by its own wind force it burned part of the reason it was constrained. you said it was was because of the wharfs, because of the water. if there if it hadn't been water there, it would just been cleaned. it have burned. it would have burned in both directions. but because of the water, it was stopped because of the wharfs. but there there was i think that there was a greater greater ability to control at the at end of it that the southern end, the fire, there were more there were some firefighters on there right away. so they were able to get them. but when it started spreading, it created own wind. and for some reason it moved in that direction. oh, yes can you give us now what the street is from the macy's department on the ground on. yes, let's see if i could show you that let me see if i can. yeah, let me let me get let me get up and i'll see if i can show you. here. so here's. this is this is a bit rough hold on slide show place. there we go so you can kind of see that wash in street that area where we're we're is right now that area was totally destroyed now this thing about washington street the washington streak of washington street was totally devastated on one side. and it was it was okay on the other side. and that was because of the the configuration of firefighters who were there. there were some efforts in one of the buildings on, the other side of washington street in a store store called hovis which is long gone. but the employees of hovis stuck it out in that building. and as sparks were coming in, they were beating it out with rugs, and they had a little of water and they were just using it to great effect in terms of beating out any sparks that flew on to the building, they were able to save it, but i think what's let me see if i can go back here. this is kind of a better picture of it. the thing is that if you try to relate the streets to what's today things have been changed quite a bit. and where those wharfs, that's all built out now the land landfill was used to where. see if i can get this to work here here. not showing up so much, but basically you can kind of see where of. broad street is now. that's cut across the brush you but now we have atlanta street that goes beyond that so that's the building. so sometimes it's kind of hard to picture where this fire was because the area, even though many of the streets are the same of many of the area, has been expanded so much. i've to walk the the around the perimeter