The Fire — Wednesday, 23 April 1879

23 April 1879 · the destruction

The Scholastic's account of 26 April 1879, printed three days after the fire, is the day's record, and it is carried here at the depth it was written. The fire began about eleven o'clock on Wednesday morning, first seen from the Minims' yard as flames on the roof near the east side of the dome. Workmen had been on the roof until ten; the origin was never ascertained — a smoldering ember, the sun on dry timber dust, or a spark from the steam-house chimney remained, in the paper's words, "a matter of conjecture." Bucket lines up the stairways failed once the dome's supports burned through and "the massive statue fell upon the roof, carrying the flames into the dry mansard wood work." Students saved libraries, museums, furniture, and professors' papers, and much was destroyed by the saving — "the most valuable books, some of them precious tomes, hundreds of years old, were thus burned on the ground outside," thrown from windows into ground fires. South Bend's engine, unused for two years and recently repaired, came with Mayor Lucius G. Tong, Councilman Nevius, Superintendent Abbott, Chief Brusie, and Assistant Hull, and saved the kitchen, steam house, and printing office, and perhaps the presbytery and the church; the wind from the southwest carried the fire away from Sacred Heart. No one died and almost no one was hurt — the students P. J. Dougherty slightly injured jumping between floors and Florian Devoto with him, the merchant Klingel prostrated by heat, Senator Leeper narrowly missed by a falling cornice.

The Scholastic's inventory is exact. Destroyed: the great college utterly; the infirmary burned out, with the general and students' offices; Music Hall entirely, all its pianos but one lost and the students' trunks saved; Minims' Hall entirely. Standing: the church, the presbytery, Science Hall, the kitchen, the steam-house, the printing office, and Washington Hall. "This destruction was accomplished in about three hours." At three o'clock Corby's council resolved to close the college year; the students, assembled in the church, protested their willingness to remain, and accepted dismissal only on the president's promise that a new college "more excellent than the one burned down" would receive them on the first Tuesday of September. Degrees were conferred on Thursday afternoon in the collegiate, law, and medical classes and on Friday morning in the commercial faculty; the secretary telegraphed all parents on Wednesday night while the students slept in Washington Hall on saved bedding. Chicago's Evening Journal had the story at three o'clock Wednesday and the Associated Press carried it nationwide. The loss was estimated at $200,000 against insurance of about $45,000, in the Chicago Tribune's editorial accounting. That same Saturday evening a public meeting in South Bend, "without regard to creed," expressed the city's sympathy, and Judge T. G. Turner read a poem written that day by Thomas A. Daily, a former graduate and professor then editing South Bend's Daily Herald. Sorin himself had left on Monday morning, 21 April, for Europe "in the brightest spirits," and had perhaps not yet heard when the Scholastic wrote. The words the university's own telling hands down as his on returning to the ruins — that he had built too small, and that "tomorrow, as soon as the bricks cool, we will rebuild it, bigger and better than ever," with the old man seen that day pushing a wheelbarrow of still-smoldering bricks — are carried by the university itself as a story passed down through the generations, and they are printed here at exactly that strength; the documented response is the rebuild itself.

1. Notre Dame Scholastic, 26 April 1879, quoted in A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame, campus history, "Fire and rebuilding"
3. Chicago Tribune, editorial, April 1879