The fire whose cause no record assigns

5 SEPTEMBER 1872 · CAUSE UNASSIGNED

The worst night in the town's history begins with a sentence that declines to explain it: On the evening of 5 September 1872, fire broke out in Mishawaka and destroyed nearly ninety percent of the business district, the town hall with it — the town's hand engine stored inside the hall, so that the fire consumed the means of fighting it. The Fire & Public Safety section of this record carries the fire whole: the water works and the fire establishment the town built out of its ashes, and the second great fire of 1886. What belongs here is the one question that section's sources, and this section's own search, leave open: what started it. The next day's press of record answers in its own words. The telegraph dispatch from Mishawaka printed in the Indianapolis News of 6 September 1872 reports that the fire "broke out in a barn near the business portion of this town, and spread rapidly," and then says, flatly: "No cause is assigned, though some early at the fire plainly smelled burning kerosene." The dispatch puts the loss at $150,000 against some $40,000 of insurance, the Presbyterian church among the buildings burned, the wind blowing strong from the southwest. The smell of kerosene is a witness detail the dispatch itself refuses to promote: it assigns no cause, names no suspect, and reports no suspicion of any person.

No later account in the record this history rests on does what the dispatch declined to do. The commissioned history gives the night its conditions — hot, dry, a strong wind, a wooden downtown — and no origin beyond them; the National Register nomination that measures the destruction assigns no cause either. The two tellings do not even agree on the hour: the commissioned history has the fire breaking out at 7:45 p.m., the next-day dispatch at 8:15, and the disagreement is carried here openly rather than resolved. Barns in 1872 held lanterns, hay, and kerosene, and any of them is conjecture; the record offers none. The town's own newspaper is the file that would speak first and closest: the Mishawaka Enterprise's issues of that September stand on the public library's film — the film's run resumes with the issue of 7 September 1872, two days after the fire — and that issue has not been pulled for the cause question. Until it is, the trail ends where it began, at the dispatch's own sentence: no cause is assigned, now standing in print for more than a century and a half.

Sources:

1. The Indianapolis News, 6 September 1872 (Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana State Library) — the telegraph dispatch from Mishawaka: the barn, the hour of 8:15, "No cause is assigned, though some early at the fire plainly smelled burning kerosene," the loss and insurance figures.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — the hour of 7:45 p.m. and the night's conditions, as carried in the Fire & Public Safety section of this history.
3. National Park Service, National Register registration form, Mishawaka Fire Station No. 4 — the measure of the destruction, the town hall and the stored engine.
4. the Fire & Public Safety section of this history — the fire whole, and the establishment built from it.
5. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, newspaper holdings — the Enterprise film's resumption at 7 September 1872, the unpulled settling source for the town's own account.