The Great Seattle Fire of 1889

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It was mid-afternoon on June 6, 1889 when a man working at a Seattle shop accidentally started a fire and then helped it burn hotter. The man was John Back, who was an assistant to Victor Clairmont, who had a woodworking shop on Front Street and Madison Avenue. Back was heating glue over a gasoline fire when the glue boiled over and caught fire. Wood chips dotted the shop floor, which also had deposits of turpentine. Back's attempts to douse the fire with water served only to thin the turpentine and spread the fire more quickly. Fearing for their lives, Back and the others inside the two-story building fled into the street. At the time, most buildings and boardwalks were made of wood, which was more dry than normal because of the pleasant weather that Seattle residents had enjoyed through the spring.

Great Seattle Fire

Historians think that the fire started about 2:15 p.m. Firefighters arrived a half hour later, by which time the fire was still burning and, in fact, had spread to a nearby liquor store, and the smoke from the fire was dense and threatening. The liquor store exploded, sending alcohol flying in various directions and fueling the fire further. Soon, the entire block was on fire.

The Spring Hill Water Company, a private company, provided the city's water. Hydrants were on every other street. Water pipes, made of wood, were small and inadequate to cope with a sudden spike in demand from the addition of multiple hoses; as a result, the water pressure fell to a trickle. Firefighters turned to nearby Elliott Bay for water, but the tide was out and the hoses weren't long enough to reach. As the fire spread and the water available proved inadequate, the wind rose. On fire were the Commercial Mill, the Colman Building, the Occidental Hotel, Trinity Church, and Frye's Opera House.

Directing the efforts of the volunteer fire brigade was Mayor Robert Moran. The fire chief, Josiah Collins, was at that very moment attending a firefighting convention in San Francisco. Moran directed crews to blow up an entire city block in order to prevent the fire's spreading; the fire jumped the block and spread further, to the city's wharves and even up a hill. A similar explosion-as-fire-block effort failed elsewhere in the city.

A quick-thinking man named Lawrence Booth lugged buckets of water to the roof of the Courthouse and then poured the water down the sides of the building; this effort saved the building, especially since the low water pressure allowed fire crews to get water only to the first floor of the building. Other people copied Booth's strategy and saved other nearby buildings. A similar scheme some people employed was covering homes with wet blankets.

Many residents abandoned their homes, moving as much of their belongings as they could into wagons or onto ships that were then moved out into the harbor, away from the burning wharves. City officials later said that they did not keep count of deaths in the fire; the death toll is thought to have been very slight, with one death known during the fire and a few during the subsequent cleanup.

Great Seattle Fire

The damage to the city infrastructure was extensive. The fire burned itself out about 3 a.m. the following morning, claiming 25 city blocks in all, an area equaling 120 acres. Gone was the entirety of the business district. Gone were the railroad terminals. Gone were all but four of the wharves. (One unexpected benefit of the fire's damage to the wharves and to some ramshackle areas of the city was the death of a large number of rats as well.) Thousands of people had lost their homes and their jobs.

A group of businessmen met just hours after the fire winked out, to discuss how to rebuild. First and foremost, the local law enforcement group declared martial law and deputized 200 special deputies to patrol the city and prevent looting. Word of the conflagration had spread, and donations poured in from other cities. Tacoma, usually a competitor in trade and settlement, sent $20,000 and a group of volunteers to help rebuild Seattle. Large amounts of supplies arrived from San Francisco soon after that. Businesses began again, operating out of tents until their new buildings could be constructed. This time, city officials used brick and stone. In some places, workers ended up raising the street level–in some places up to 22 feet–and this eliminated some of the city's hills. Within a year, workers had erected more than 450 buildings.

The city took ownership of both the fire brigade and the water company, creating paid firefighting positions, upgrading the water delivery infrastructure with more hydrants and larger (metal) pipes, and sourcing water from the nearby Cedar River.

The quick reconstruction drove a population boom. A year later, the number of residents had increased from 25,000 to 43,000.

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