The great fires, from the firemen's side

1871–1885 · THE RESPONSE RECORD

The fires live elsewhere: The fires themselves — the Studebaker works fires of June 1872, 24 August 1874 and 1885, with their losses and their rebuilding — are told as events in the Major Events section of this history, and the fires of the city's later landmarks stand in the sections that own those buildings. What belongs to this section is the response: what the fires found when they came, and what they changed in the service that fought them.

October 1871 — the night Chicago burned: The city's first documented fire emergency was a fire a hundred miles away. When the Great Chicago Fire burned in October 1871 and its smoke stood on South Bend's horizon, Mayor Humphreys, as the Government section's record names him, organized a volunteer fire patrol for the city, its shifts standing around the clock until the rains came. It is the first time the record shows the city organizing against fire before the fact rather than after it, and it belongs to the volunteer era's own government.

January 1874 — the Baptist church fire: The hardest fight of the volunteer department's life, in Howard's telling, was not a factory but a church. In January 1874 the frame building of the First Baptist Church, at the corner of Main and Jefferson streets on the present post office site — moved from the next lot south in 1864 and greatly enlarged — burned. "This is known in local annals as the Baptist church fire," Howard writes, "and was one of the most terrible fire contests that the old volunteer fire department ever experienced. The weather was intensely cold and many of the firemen never recovered from the dreadful exposure then experienced." No line-of-duty roll of the volunteer era survives in the record reached; Howard's sentence is the closest the record comes to one.

1872 and 1874 — the Studebaker fires: The two great wagon-works fires fell on either side of the water works. The June 1872 fire found the volunteer department of hand engines, one steamer and cisterns. The fire of 24 August 1874 — the larger, with about a third of its loss insured — found a department eight months into the standpipe era, with hydrant pressure standing at the corners. Seven weeks after it, on 19 October 1874, the council disbanded the engine companies altogether, the pressure having made them obsolete, and left the city's firefighting to hose and hook-and-ladder companies until the paid reorganization of 1886. The third Studebaker fire, in 1885, fell in the last full year of the volunteers; the paid department was organized the following November. The sequence is printed as the record gives it; the record does not say that any one fire caused the reorganization, and neither does this section.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1 — the Baptist church fire of January 1874, in the First Baptist Church's history; the disbandment of the engine companies, 19 October 1874.
2. The Government section of this history (banked) — Mayor Humphreys's volunteer fire patrol of October 1871, organized as the Chicago fire's smoke stood on the horizon.
3. The Major Events section of this history (banked) — the Studebaker fires of 1872, 1874 and 1885 as events, with their loss figures and insurance.