One Sunday night, in Chicago City around approximately 9 p.m., a small fire started by a small shed, having been ignited, and soon turned into one of the most memorable and unforgettable moments in America’s devastating disasters. What would have been thought of as a small fire soon spread throughout the city eventually covering about four square miles and killing hundreds of Chicago’s citizens. This was recorded as one of the first great fires that destroyed a large amount of the city, but was surely not the last. Although Chicago recovered from the event, developing one of the country’s most well-known fire fighting sources, Baltimore’s leaders did not follow the same precautions that Chicago’s leaders had done, after the Great Chicago Fire. A little over thirty years later Baltimore experienced a much related disaster, also due to a small fire. In the previous centuries, cities experienced being at very high risks for spreading fires, mostly due to close living arrangements, the overuse of lumber for building, and the lack of enforcing strict fire codes. It is speculated that the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 could have been easily avoided by having better firefighting equipment and better chosen procedures, but the fire was so unstoppable that the Maryland National Guard became involved in the fight to stop the flames from spreading further. The thirty hour catastrophe caused the city to suffer extremely from unemployment and financial losses, but within the following rebuilding of the city grew a story of success. The question is, “Was the success of the city after the fire worth the damage that it had caused Baltimore’s citizens physically and emotionally?”, but before I go into detail about the story of success I must tell story of the progression of the great catastrophe. This will get all of you blog readers to understand the full extent of how inescapable the fire had became.
On the morning of Sunday, February 7th, 1904, Baltimore’s fire department was currently preparing for an inspection scheduled for 11:00 a.m. of that date, but soon received orders, by an automatic alarm, to arrive at the John E. Hurst Building, between Hopkins Place and German Street. Engine 15 and Truck 2 arrived to the scene discovering, what they believed, to have been a small fire. Rumor has it that the blaze ignited by a Baltimore citizen, who dropped a lit cigarette or cigar through an opening of a cracked, glass window, leading to the basement of the building. At around 11:10 a.m. the entire Baltimore City Fire Department was called to prevent the spreading of the blaze, but a devastating happening occurred. Since the fire had started in the basement of the building, it had spread to the base of the elevator shaft and moved up along the shaft causing an immediate combustion of almost the entire building. The enormous explosion blew off the entire roof of the building and all of its windows, which landed into other surrounding buildings. Somewhat around noon, the help of the Washington D.C. Fire Department was then requested.
Upon the arriving of the D.C. Fire Department came another crisis. They soon discovered that the hose couplings that the near fire department came to the rescue with did not fit the fire hydrants of Baltimore City, which was not unusual for the D.C. Department to obtain. According to Wikipedia- the free encyclopedia, by 1903, there were over 600 sizes and variations of the fire hose couplings in the United States. The fire hoses were then attached to the fire hydrants by wrapping canvas around the two items, extremely reducing efficiency use considering that the tallest buildings, such as: The Maryland Trust Company, the B &O Railroad Building, and the Continental Trust Building could be seen in flames from as far away as the city of Washington D.C.
I retreived these images from a file at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and they came out of The Sun Paper, issued on February 6, 1966. These photographs show the progression of the fire, to spectators standing miles away from Baltimore City ( It did not say exactly how many miles away). As you can see in Image 1, that the Continental Building is still shown on the left. In Image 2 the building no longer appears, and by Images 3 and 4 you can see that the fire grew closer to the city's Shot Tower (The very narrow building in the middle of the images).
In order to stop the spread of the fire, a dense decision was made by Mayor Robert M. McLane to dynamite in the John Duer and Son Building, located on Charles Street, and the Schwab Brothers Building, located on Charles and German Streets, in order to keep the fire grounded, which would eventually stop the spread of fire. This decision to keep the fire grounded was made on count of how the narrow width of the city’s streets caused the fires to bounce from building to building, but then backfired when the buildings, with explosives, contained in them, shook but never came down and the shake caused the fires to spread in other directions.
At around 8:00 pm the wind changed direction, blowing the fire towards the East, which unfortunately covered many parts of the city that weren’t expected to catch fire. However, the change in the wind’s direction did prevent City Hall from catching fire. Right when the blaze had spread close enough to the city’s main building, the flames then took the Eastward turn. Around this same time Philadelphia and Wilmington Fire Departments arrived. On to the second day the fire was continuously scattering, and by twelve midnight the Maryland National Guard decided to arrive with two thousand soldiers and sailors, most of the guardsmen arrived to cope with the surrounding audience. There were Baltimore citizens both grounded and standing on rooftops, all the while there were collapsing buildings and flying debris that could have possibly killed an onlooker. Around the same time that the Maryland National Guard arrived, another fire had started progressing in the Institute Association of Mechanical Arts, on the corner of Center Market and Water Street, due to flying debris of existing buildings that had already caught on fire from the opposite side of the city, five blocks away. Soon the two fires combined to form one large fire that covered almost all of downtown, which caused fire departments from York, Harrisburg, and Altoona all to arrive from Pennsylvania.
The first sign of any halting of the fire came around 6:00 a.m. when Philadelphia fire fighters stopped the fire from spreading to the Light Street Piers and all of South of Pratt Street, by forming a barrier of water hoses, but the main seizing of the fire came around 11:00 a.m. of the same day when thirty seven fire engines formed a barrier at the Jones Falls, all of their hoses gathering water from the falls. The barrier stopped the fire from reaching East Baltimore and it took four hours to put out all flames of the fire, although the ambers took weeks to extinguish.
On the morning of Sunday, February 7th, 1904, Baltimore’s fire department was currently preparing for an inspection scheduled for 11:00 a.m. of that date, but soon received orders, by an automatic alarm, to arrive at the John E. Hurst Building, between Hopkins Place and German Street. Engine 15 and Truck 2 arrived to the scene discovering, what they believed, to have been a small fire. Rumor has it that the blaze ignited by a Baltimore citizen, who dropped a lit cigarette or cigar through an opening of a cracked, glass window, leading to the basement of the building. At around 11:10 a.m. the entire Baltimore City Fire Department was called to prevent the spreading of the blaze, but a devastating happening occurred. Since the fire had started in the basement of the building, it had spread to the base of the elevator shaft and moved up along the shaft causing an immediate combustion of almost the entire building. The enormous explosion blew off the entire roof of the building and all of its windows, which landed into other surrounding buildings. Somewhat around noon, the help of the Washington D.C. Fire Department was then requested.
I found this photograph, shown above, with many others on the Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Project, via web, from the Enoch Pratt Free Library. This image was taken seconds after the explosion happened in the John E. Hurst Building.
This Image was taken from the Maryland Cultural Heritage Project, via web, as well. This image shows what department officials, during the fire, called the "Hot Corner", referring to the three buildings that caught ablaze around the same time. These buildings being the Maryland Trust Company (starting from left), the B & O Railroad Building, and the Continental Trust Building. Once the city's three tallest buildings caught ablaze the temperature was recorded as reaching as high as 2500 degrees on this one corner.
Image 1 photographed at 8:45 a.m.
Image 2 photographed at 11:30 p.m.
Image 3 photographed at 1 a.m.
Image 4 photographed at 3 a.m.
The Continental Trust Building did survive the fire and this is an image, shown below, of what the building looks like today, courtesy of The Historical Marker Database.
Now before we move along any further I wanted my blog readers to understand that, of course the fire engines in 1904 were nothing like the engines that we have in Baltimore today. Below are a few images of what I retrieved throughout my research and I photocopied, again, just to let my readers undertstand the equipment that the Baltimore Fire Department of 1904 had to work with.
There is a steam fire engine in the distance of this actual image shown above, but the image below is a close-up, hand drawn image.
A few horses and a steam pot for the fire fighter to sit on..... 
At around 8:00 pm the wind changed direction, blowing the fire towards the East, which unfortunately covered many parts of the city that weren’t expected to catch fire. However, the change in the wind’s direction did prevent City Hall from catching fire. Right when the blaze had spread close enough to the city’s main building, the flames then took the Eastward turn. Around this same time Philadelphia and Wilmington Fire Departments arrived. On to the second day the fire was continuously scattering, and by twelve midnight the Maryland National Guard decided to arrive with two thousand soldiers and sailors, most of the guardsmen arrived to cope with the surrounding audience. There were Baltimore citizens both grounded and standing on rooftops, all the while there were collapsing buildings and flying debris that could have possibly killed an onlooker. Around the same time that the Maryland National Guard arrived, another fire had started progressing in the Institute Association of Mechanical Arts, on the corner of Center Market and Water Street, due to flying debris of existing buildings that had already caught on fire from the opposite side of the city, five blocks away. Soon the two fires combined to form one large fire that covered almost all of downtown, which caused fire departments from York, Harrisburg, and Altoona all to arrive from Pennsylvania.
This image, shown above, was retrieved from the Maryland Historical Society in a file that contained the magazine, The Book of the Royal Blue. The magazine was issued in March of 1904 and held many interesting and detailed images that I shall publish later on throughout this blog. This specific image captured just a few of the 2,000 Maryland National Guardsmen that showed up to the fire.
This is an image,shown above, once again, I retrieved from the Maryland Cultural Heritage Project. This image shows what the Jones Falls looked like in 1904. The bridge crossing over in the distance is one of the five bridges that crossed over the Jones Falls during this time. The five crossing bridges were what the 37 steam fire engines stood on in order to halt the spreading fire.
**Summary of the thirty hour fire came to thid blog through the research of The Maryland Encyclopedia and The Maryland Cultural Heritage Project courtesy of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
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