Decidedly Grim

Today’s Devastating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The fire began about 4 a.m. in the basement of Warehouse 7 of the Nelson Morris and Co. plant, run by one of the prominent meatpacking companies in Chicago’s infamous Union Stockyards. Black smoke was spotted by a night watchman who rang the alarm at 43rd and Loomis streets. All the firemen in the Stockyards rushed to the alarm with horse-drawn steam engines and trucks in tow. Fire Marshal James Horan, known as “Big Jim” for his large stature, was called out of bed and driven to the scene in the department’s only motorized vehicle. On that frigid morning of Dec. 22, 1910, the men arrived at the windowless “hog house” and were met with an overwhelming firefighting challenge. The only way to attack the fire was to hop on a 4-foot-tall loading dock covered by a rickety wooden canopy, leaving them little space to maneuver, said Bill Cosgrove, a retired Chicago firefighter who recently wrote a book about the fire titled “Chicago’s Forgotten Tragedy.” “They had the railroad track (with standing boxcars) at their back, a canopy overhead, the fire in front of them, (and they are) confined to this small space with all this heat and smoke,” he said. The pressure of the heat and smoke climbed, and without warning, an exterior wall collapsed. Six stories of molten brick came falling down on top of the firefighters, killing 21 instantly, including Horan. Three civilians were also crushed. The furious fire ravaged the infamous Union Stockyards, devastated families and upended the Chicago Fire Department. It stood as the single greatest loss of professional big-city firefighters in U.S. history until Sept. 11, 2001.

Many of the firefighters who fought that day were from the neighborhood, leaving a whole community in grief, said Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian. The fire also made national news, as the Stockyards were one of Chicago’s most well-known landmarks at the time, he said. Local news accounts at the time described the macabre scene in detail, including how the bodies of many of the dead were found buried in the rubble amid hog meat that had been stored in the building. It took 17 hours to pull all the bodies from the ruins. Though this blaze became infamous, fires at the Stockyards were not uncommon, Cosgrove said. Highly flammable chemicals used for meat production and spilled on Stockyard floors made conditions ripe for fires. “Every fireman knows what a stockyard fire means,” the Tribune reported at the time. “The men knew of the treachery of the ancient shells of grease soaked wood and shaky brick walls. Chicago firemen cherish no illusions when they go in to strangle a big fire at the yards with their hands.” The fire, started by a faulty electrical socket, left behind 19 widows and 35 orphaned children just before Christmas Day.

Culled from: Chicago Tribune

Facts