Wisconsin's Greatest Disaster

A couple years ago, Fred and I both read the book Firestorm at Peshtigo by Denise Gess and William Lutz. I had always been interested in the story of the worst fire in American history after learning about it in elementary school. Fred grew up only 40 miles from the town and surrounding area that was totally destroyed on October 8, 1871. Since reading the book, we both wanted to visit the Peshtigo Fire Museum and the fire cemeteries. Our friend Bill read it too, so we made the trip there Sunday from our cabin on the bikes.
The museum is in an old church that was moved years ago from one side of the Peshtigo River to the other. Obviously, there wasn't much left after the fire to be displayed in a museum, but there are a few items that were miraculously saved. Thousands of other things from that time period have been donated to give visitors a sense of what life had been like for the people there before the fire's devastation.
Just to give you some basic history, the fire occurred the same night as the Chicago Fire, and it caused a much greater loss of life and damage than the one in Illinois. Because of the poor communication in those days and the fact that Chicago was bigger, the enormity of the Wisconsin fire wasn't realized until later. The book provides horrific details about some of the people who were lost and the few who survived. The death toll estimates range between 1500 and 2500 people; it was hard to calculate because many bodies were totally disintegrated by the fire's high temperatures. In those days, itinerant people were common and there was no way to know how many were in the area during the fire. A display at the museum reported that 50 immigrants arrived in Peshtigo for work the day before the fire and were never seen again afterwards. The huge fireballs literally blew across Green Bay and killed people in Door County; a small town of 60 people burned to death there as they slept.
Many citizens fled to the river trying to escape the inferno, but that didn't necessarily save them. In the cemetery we read a marker that told about an older boy who took his young brother and sister, one on each arm, into the river for four hours--only to come out of the water to discover that the youngsters had died from hypothermia.
Going to the cemeteries felt like stepping back in time, overcome with the solemn awe you would similarly feel at a place like Arlington or Ground Zero. The remnants of whole families were buried in single graves, the stones listing names and ages of the "kinder" (children) in German. Marker after marker had October 8, 1871 as the date of death. One cemetery is adjacent to the museum, and no burials have been permitted there since 1916. A mass grave for 350 unknown people is just a small plot--so little was left to identify or bury. Harmony Cemetery a few miles out of town has another mass grave as well as individual ones for fire victims. We recognized names on the stones of people we'd read about in the book; one man, Karl Lamp, who lost his pregnant wife and four young daughters in the fire. He later remarried and had seven more children; some of his descendants still live in the area and go by the name of Lemke.
I left the cemetery feeling sadness for the victims and amazement at the resilience of the survivors. They rebuilt their town and farms, starting new lives from the ashes of what had been. It's an amazing story; if you get a chance to read the book or visit Peshtigo, do so!