The Great Fire | Overview
On October 8, 1871, on a lazy Sunday, a fire broke out in a barn near the edge of Chicago. According to Murphy, no one knows for certain how the fire started. He refutes the popular myth that it began when a cow being milked by Catherine O'Leary kicked over a gas lamp, saying that it was impossible for O'Leary to have been in the barn at the time.
At that time, Chicago was in the midst of a long drought, making its wooden buildings and wooden sidewalks very dry and thus vulnerable to fire. The city had already experienced a number of relatively small fires, including an...
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After the fire, how many people were homeless?
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