In 1871, this Wisconsin lumbering town burned to the ground. Learn about the deadliet wildfire recorded in U.S. history.
Drawing of the Peshtigo Fire, showing people seeking refuge in the Peshtigo River. Drawing originally appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1871. Much of the coverage of the wildfire that destroyed the Maui city of Lahaina on Aug. 8 labels it the deadliest wildfire “in modern American history” or “in America in over a century.” With 115 people known dead andBut on the evening of Oct. 8, 1871, the deadliest wildfire in recorded world history burned through 1.5 million acres of northern Wisconsin.
The mills and factories within town not only used fire in their operations, but also produced vast quantities of wooden waste: Sawdust was stuffed under the plank sidewalks and in the foundations of all-wood houses, layered in the streets and in left in huge piles when it couldn’t be used. In the lumbering camps that filled the forests, up to a quarter of a cut tree might be left behind; among the detritus was what the U.S. Forest Service calls “Maui’s Deadly Wildfires Burn Through LahainaIn 1871, the timber would normally have been floated downstream for processing, but an extensive summer drought had dried up the waterways and marshlands.
Brushfires were constantly burning as a result — all around Peshtigo and throughout the Upper Midwest — and the townsfolk had become used to the constant smoke in the air. Ships on Lake Michigan were forced to navigate by compass through haze so dense their captains couldn’t see even at midday, and school had been cancelled because so many children were ill with hacking coughs.
Fire survivor Elbridge Merrill wrote some years later: “It is hard to give an idea of the excessive drought. The greatest care was used to guard against fire but in spite of all precautions, there were fires everywhere about us.”As night fell on Oct. 8th, the wind began to pick up. Though there was no way for those in Peshtigo to know it, a cyclonic storm had been bearing down on them since the day before, and it was whipping those small brushfires into a frenzy.
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