The great fires of 1871 and 1881

[SpartyOn]

Cool article....

MAJOR POST-LOGGING FIRES IN MICHIGAN: the 1800's

Economic prosperity due to the logging industry in Michigan was breeding ecological disaster. Timber waste, forest fires, and a total lack of interest in conservation practices all contributed to the devastation. A great fire in 1871, for example, damaged the entire Lake Michigan shoreline, destroyed the cities of Holland and Manistee, and spread across to Port Huron. By 1900, the lands of the northern Lower Peninsula and the eastern Upper Peninsula were stripped of pine, and scores of lumber towns were dying.

Fire has played a major role in shaping vegetation patterns. Native Americans set fires to clear wooded areas and improve wildlife habitat for hunting. European settlers suppressed brush fires, causing forests to replace some large prairies. Wasteful timber-cutting practices led to disastrous forest fires, including the deadly 1871 Peshtigo fire. In the early lumbering days, more timber was lost to fire than was actually harvested. Today, wildfires still affect the logging, tourism, and recreational industries. Most fires strike between March and November; they occur particularly often in drought years.

Forest fires were a part of the logging scene in Michigan, although not necessarily the result of it. Nor were forest fires new to the state at the time logging began. Extensive burned-over areas were reported by early surveyors long before the lumbermen arrived. But the great influence of people during the logging era, and the large areas of dry pine slash increased both the possibility of fire and the intensity of those which occurred. Many reached tremendous proportions, burning unchecked for weeks or months through slashings, standing timber, cities and settlements, causing human misery, death, and waste. There is evidence to show that these lumbering era fires destroyed more merchantable timber than was cut. Most of the pine areas in the north part of the Lower Peninsula have burned over at least once, and many several times. Fires were not confined to pine lands, for hardwood slashings also burned. Large parts of these once charred lands are now occupied by jack pine, oak, aspen, and white birch, species which form much of the young forest growth found in northern Michigan.

Forest fires have posed a danger throughout Michigan history, particularly in times of drought. The wasteful practices of the early timber industry worsened the hazard by leaving behind huge amounts of dry wood and brush piles.

After decades of logging activities, Michigan was littered with thousands of hectares of slash--dead branches, leaves, and wood. In their haste to move on to new cutting sites, loggers usually gave little thought to the lands they were leaving. By the 1870s stumps and branches already littered much of northern Michigan. There was no longer any barrier to erosion on cutover land, and the dried debris created an enormous fire hazard. At the end of the dry summer months fires frequently broke out, sometimes moving into still uncut timberlands or settled areas, as in 1871 and 1881, when fires broke out across the state.

Upon drying, these became highly flammable, and led to innumerable fires. Many of these fires were immense, covered large areas, and burned for days. The scene below shows an area near the Upper Manistee River after an 1894 fire.

Source: Unknown

Source: Unknown

Michigan’s first catastrophic fire was in the autumn of 1871. However, the hundreds of lives lost in fires in Chicago and northeastern Wisconsin at the same time overshadowed Michigan’s losses. A combination of numerous small and large fires, the 1871 fire swept across the Lower Peninsula, destroying Holland, Manistee and several Saginaw Valley towns and leaving an estimated 20 dead. A decade later, in September 1881, the Thumb was ravaged by fires that took 282 lives, blackened a million acres and cost $250,000 in property damage.

The 1871 fires

Let's start with the first big fires in the region--which also happen to be the most famous and the largest! Inevitable disaster occurred in the drought year of 1871. On the night of October 8, hot winds from the south caused normally controllable small fires to shift suddenly and gather force. They swept through a 60-mile stretch north of Green Bay, Wisconsin and a 50-mile stretch on the Door Peninsula, and collectively became known as the "Peshtigo Fire." The conflagration claimed an estimated 1,200-1,500 lives. Survivors later told of jumping into rivers to escape the flames, and witnessing firestorms, or "tornadoes of fire," that devastated enormous areas. Many of those who sought shelter in the Peshtigo River literally boiled to death.

Source: Atlas of Wisconsin

On October 8, 1871, at about the same hour, two devastating fires started, one in rural Peshtigo, Wisconsin, the other in downtown Chicago. Both fires remain today among the worst natural disasters to befall the Midwest. In fact, no forest fire since the Peshtigo disaster has taken more lives; and the Chicago fire remains the most destructive metropolitan blaze in the

nation's history, having caused some $200,000,000 in property damage and all but obliterating the city's core.

The Great Chicago fire caused an estimated 250 deaths. Numerous fires on Michigan’s Lower Peninsula also started on October 8, 1871, at places like Holland, Lansing, and Port Huron (see map below). Because they started during the day, the Michigan fires claimed fewer lives, though they destroyed more land and timber. Newspapers of the time publicized the Chicago fire widely, making it the most infamous of the three disasters. The Peshtigo Fire stands today as the deadliest forest fire in modern world history.

Source: Unknown

The Holland fire, like the others, was due to a combination of high winds and extremely dry conditions. The heart of the Dutch settlements in western Michigan (at Holland) shared the same kind of disaster that struck Chicago, Illinois, October 8 and 9, 1871. At the time, Holland was a small, insignificant town in comparison to Chicago, but for the Dutch immigrants in Michigan, the "Colony at Holland" (pop. 2400), as it was first known, was the focal point for religious refugees who had come in 1847.

A devastating economic tragedy, the fire of 1871 nearly wiped out the town founded by the Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte. The results of hard work of 24 years were practically wiped out in the early morning hours of October 9. But it was also a disaster for the concept and vision that brought the Dutch to western Michigan. Although the basic concept was fading into the background when the tragedy occurred, the ideas which brought the village into existence were still operative in the functioning of the town. Fortunately the fire impeded the growth and development of De Kolonie only temporarily.

Most of the townspeople were Dutch immigrants, but a mixture of native Americans was evident by the fact that two lodges functioned in the town (to which Dutch immigrants by religious conviction did not belong), and some English speaking congregations, such as Methodist and Episcopal, had been organized. The Dutch were members of either the predominant Dutch Reformed Church or the True Reformed Church which broke from the Dutch Church in 1857. All in all, Holland was a very flourishing little city that had a harbor and new rail connections, making it a natural market for all the outlying agricultural districts.

A period of extensive drought preceded the fire of 1871. Several fires had broken out around the town before October 8, and Hope College had been threatened only a week before. An added hazard was the cut timber and brush that lay in the woods surrounding the town. The old river bed and ravine along Thirteenth Street behind the Third Reformed Church was filled with such debris. The situation became critical on Sunday afternoon, October 8, when a southwesterly wind began to build up in intensity. The townspeople turned out en masse to fight fires that were flaring up on the southern and southwestern part of the town even though that first alarm sounded during the time of the afternoon church services. Disaster was upon the town with the development of "hurricane" winds in the evening. Any thought of saving the town was forgotten when two major structures on the west side caught fire. Within the space of two hours the fire took its toll. "The entire territory covered by the fire was mowed as clean as with a reaper; there was not a fencepost or a sidewalk plank and hardly the stump of a shade tree left to designate the old lines," said one resident.

Although the disaster was nearly total, the recovery was rapid, and Holland today is a thriving city in its own right.

The 1881 Thumb fire:

The fire of 4-6 September 1881, commonly known as the Thumb Fire, burned well over one million acres, cost 282 lives, and did more than $2,347,000 damage. The fire destroyed a major part of Tuscola, Huron, Sanilac, and St. Clair counties. It consumed 1,531 houses and 1,480 barns and outbuildings, and left 14,448 homeless. Like the 1871 fire, the fire of 1881 came at the end of an extremely severe drought and was the result of hundreds of land-clearing fires whipped into a cauldron of flame by high winds. In the Saginaw Valley and the Thumb region it burned over much the same territory that had been burned by the 1871 fire. This fire, 10 years previous, had been so strong that winds associated with it had blown over trees, and many of these were still laying around, dry. Also, 1871 fire did not consume all the slash left by the logging operations of the previous decades, so much was left to burn. No one is sure just how or just where in Tuscola County the fire started. It was the time of year when people used to burn brush piles and other debris left by lumbermen and those engaged in clearing the land. Many people think the wind may have whipped a brushpile fire out of control. The fire probably started as a series of small blazes in slash fires coalesced into a wall of flame moving to the NE. Its severity is accounted for not only by the drought and high winds that prevailed, but by the fact that the country was full of slash from logging and land clearing, and of dead and down timber killed, but unconsumed, by the fire of 1871. The appalling thing about this loss of life was the large number of children involved due to whole families being wiped out. One detailed account of the fires that burned in the Thumb is given in a report of a man who traveled over the burned area after the fire and interviewed many of the survivors. He emphasizes the extreme dryness that prevailed, the presence of vast areas of logging slash, the debris left by the fire of 1871, the prevalence of land-clearing fires, and the occurrence of winds of hurricane force, all of which combined to produce the holocaust which resulted. There have been bad fires in Michigan since, but none as severe or extensive as the great fires of 1871 and 1881.

Source: Photograph by Randy Schaetzl, Professor of Geography - Michigan State University

Persons who have not experienced a big forest fire cannot conceive of the appalling conditions which occur and the terror and helplessness of those in its path. The following excerpts from contemporary accounts give some idea of the conditions that prevailed in the 1881 fire:

From the Evening News, Detroit: Thursday, September 1, 1881: "The drought all over the Mississippi Valley and throughout the northwest continues with unabated rigor. Atmosphere scorches and blisters everything...vegetation dried to a cinder, gives nothing but material for fire. Trees shedding their leaves a month before the usual time; grass brown and withered. Pastures and streams dried up. Milk scarce, butter a luxury. If it does not rain and rain hard soon, food will be scarce this winter...Buyers paying the unheard price of 18 and 20 cents a pound for butter."

Saturday, September 3: "Farmer near Stark overcome while fighting fire and burned to death."

Tuesday, September 6: "Women burned to death while fleeing for shelter near Lapeer...terrible fires reported raging in the forests northwest and north of Bay City...air full of cinders... people suffering from heat and smoke...Fires devastating the woods around Flint."

"Saginaw: Intensely warm and smoke suffocating. East of the city forest fires raging fiercely. ...hundreds of acres afire. Fires plainly visible from the city at night...

"Detroit: Heat and drought almost unprecedented. Throughout the timber regions great forest fires are raging in all directions from the Mississippi to the ocean. In many places the earth is so dry that fires have penetrated into the soil, following the vegetable fibers and moving mysteriously by this means over many miles only to break to the surface in a destroying conflagration wherever the surface vegetation furnishes fuel. (Fires) seem to break out spontaneously from the bosom of the earth.

"Port Huron: Tremendous fires in Sanilac and Huron counties...Richmondville destroyed and Deckerville reported burned... Many people horribly burned."

read more...http://www.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/fires_ii.html

[Jonger]

Very interesting.... The only area to never come back was probably the thumb for the most part. Imagine how much co2 had to be released from this.

[SpartyOn]

Very interesting.... The only area to never come back was probably the thumb for the most part. Imagine how much co2 had to be released from this.

The Kingston stump prairie in the UP never recovered either. The fires were so hot from the slash and pine resin that it destroyed the soil. A once mighty forest is now nothing than a barren northern desert.

You can only wonder how dry and hot the air mass was on Oct 8th 1871. It must have been the ultimate red flag conditions.

[Jonger]

The Kingston stump prairie in the UP never recovered either. The fires were so hot from the slash and pine resin that it destroyed the soil. A once mighty forest is now nothing than a barren northern desert.

You can only wonder how dry and hot the air mass was on Oct 8th 1871. It must have been the ultimate red flag conditions.

I recall that NYC was covered in redish brown ash.

This winter I'm going to try and get my snowmobile as close to the Duck Lake Fire as possible, will be interesting to see whats left.

[Jonger]

The Kingston stump prairie in the UP never recovered either. The fires were so hot from the slash and pine resin that it destroyed the soil. A once mighty forest is now nothing than a barren northern desert.

You can only wonder how dry and hot the air mass was on Oct 8th 1871. It must have been the ultimate red flag conditions.

I rode through the Kingston plains area last winter, the stumps are still there.

[SpartyOn]

I rode through the Kingston plains area last winter, the stumps are still there.

That whole area is example of poor conservation practices during the late 1800s. I've seen those stumps too. They are massive. It's a weird landscape.

Those reports from falling ash out east are remarkable. It was also said that the glow of basically 2 million acres burning could be seen as far as Cleveland and Toronto.

[Hoosier]

Wanted to bump this thread with some more info regarding 1871. One look at a weather map from Oct 8, 1871 shows trouble. There would've been pretty strong southwesterly flow over the region in this setup, enabling fires to spread rapidly.

On October 8, major fires broke out almost simultaneously in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. When the fires were finally extinguished, over 1,700 people had died and millions of acres of forest land reduced to charcoal.

Autumn 1871 was marked by extraordinary conflagrations in widely separated regions of the United States. On the same day that the Michigan, Wisconsin and Chicago fires flared up, regions of Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana were severely devastated by prairie-fires while forest fires raged on the flanks of the Alleghenies, the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, as well as along the Red River of the North.

more here:

http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/almanac/arc2000/alm00oct.htm

[Chicago WX]

Thanks Chad.

[Hoosier]

Thanks Chad.

You're in luck...Chad has a brief post about the October fires (scroll down to October 15)

http://blogs.wlfi.com/2012/09/19/on-these-dates-in-local-weather-history-september-20-october-29/

[Chicago WX]

You're in luck...Chad has a brief post about the October fires (scroll down to October 15)

http://blogs.wlfi.co...-20-october-29/

I should have known.

[SpartyOn]

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0434%281990%29005%3C0148%3AMCOTFI%3E2.0.CO%3B2

Great link on the meteorological causes of the great fires.

[michsnowfreak]

When you are driving through miles and miles of wilderness, you can always see where the wildfires hit. I really noticed this when being up north a few weeks ago. You can literally see where the fire began and ended.

 

Regarding the 1881 fire...obviously Detroit is the closest reliable weather data to the thumb of MI for that timeframe. The 1880-81 winter was probably one of the harshest winters the midwest had ever experienced in the last 2 centuries. The snowpack was undoubtedly very deep and moisture-laden, so Im sure the 1881 growing season started out very well with drought nowhere near a concern. Summer started cool and wet than turned hot and dry (though not oppressively hot) but then as mentioned, September saw an unprecedented heatwave. To this day September 1881 (mean temp 72.2F) stands as Detroits hottest September on record, and by a long shot (the 2nd hottest, 1931, is 2.4F cooler). Such an extended heatwave near the beginning of Autumn no doubt came complete with strong southerly winds. Heat+dry+winds= wildfire.

[tamarack]

Very interesting topic. I jJust finished rereading "Burning an Empire" by Stewart Holbrook. Dated (published mid-40s) but a fine history.

That weather map posted by Hoosier may portray the classic dry cold front that wildland firefighters dread. The wind abruptly shifts 90 degrees clockwise, causing the long right-side flank to become the fire's head. This caused the blowup in S.Maine in Oct 1947. Temps and (lack of) precip at PWM:

10/23/1947...83...35...0...0 Latest PWM has ever been that warm.

10/24/1947...59...26...0...0

10/25/1947...65...20...0...0

The huge diurnal temp swings speak to low RH, there had been no measurable precip yet in Oct, and when the front came thru on 10/24 several villages were destroyed, and one fire was stopped only by the Atlantic (and spotted to an island 3/4 mile offshore, burning it off completely.)

Good conservation of resources always begins after people get over thinking the resource is endless, and that is certainly the case for early logging here and elsewhere. While the loggers bear much responsibility for the immense load of tinder-dry fuel, the ignitions (hundreds of them) were probably more from settlers trying to clear farmland. Then-common practice with slow-moving ground fires was to ignore them unless they threatened buildings. When the winds picked up, there were small fires all over the region that soon burned together and resulted in the disasters. Showing how slowly we learn, the 1947 Maine fires had the same sources of ignition, not from land clearing but just widely scattered smoldering brush fires that no one bothered with until too late.

[SpartyOn]

Very interesting topic. I jJust finished rereading "Burning an Empire" by Stewart Holbrook. Dated (published mid-40s) but a fine history.

That weather map posted by Hoosier may portray the classic dry cold front that wildland firefighters dread. The wind abruptly shifts 90 degrees clockwise, causing the long right-side flank to become the fire's head. This caused the blowup in S.Maine in Oct 1947. Temps and (lack of) precip at PWM:

10/23/1947...83...35...0...0 Latest PWM has ever been that warm.

10/24/1947...59...26...0...0

10/25/1947...65...20...0...0

The huge diurnal temp swings speak to low RH, there had been no measurable precip yet in Oct, and when the front came thru on 10/24 several villages were destroyed, and one fire was stopped only by the Atlantic (and spotted to an island 3/4 mile offshore, burning it off completely.)

Good conservation of resources always begins after people get over thinking the resource is endless, and that is certainly the case for early logging here and elsewhere. While the loggers bear much responsibility for the immense load of tinder-dry fuel, the ignitions (hundreds of them) were probably more from settlers trying to clear farmland. Then-common practice with slow-moving ground fires was to ignore them unless they threatened buildings. When the winds picked up, there were small fires all over the region that soon burned together and resulted in the disasters. Showing how slowly we learn, the 1947 Maine fires had the same sources of ignition, not from land clearing but just widely scattered smoldering brush fires that no one bothered with until too late.

Good input. One of the most troubling issues related to fuel sources was the awful logging parctice of tree crown slash. When the old growth white pines were felled, the loggers would cut off the tree crown and leave it to wither and rot on the now exposed forest floor. When all the pines were gone a baren waste land went on for acres and acres. A wasteland full of dried tree crowns and trunk axe notches. White pine wood naturally contains resins which produces a secondary fuel source. All it took was a spark to ignite fires that were naturally hotter than normal. Most forest fires actually burn above the ground for the most part but these new man created fires burned directly on the ground. The ultra heated low burning fires created firestorms beyond anything seen before. It was a recipe for disaster and loss of life. In some cases the intense heat of these fires forever damaged the soil along witg its nutrient base and treeless wastelands still exist in parts of MI. Logging has since changed, but its historical mark of destruction in MI should not be forgotten. Below is a few pics of barren stump lands and historical land features created by logging and the subsequent fires.

[SpartyOn]

Below is a few pics of barren stump lands and historical land features created by logging and the subsequent fires.

 

Notice the pic of the stone feature. That is the Sanilac Petroglyphs. The sandstone Indian artifacts were unearthed after the 1881 fires. 

[SpartyOn]

Stumbled across this link. Its an official report from the war department regarding the great thumb fire of 1881. Some chilling accounts of how many towns across the thumb had little warning before bursting into flames. 

 

http://www.archive.org/stream/reportonmichiga00bailgoog/reportonmichiga00bailgoog_djvu.txt