The Smaller Wisconsin Firestorm That Killed a Hundred and Fifty People the Same Night as Peshtigo and That No One Remembers

The night of 8 October 1871 produced three substantial firestorms across the western Great Lakes region. The Peshtigo Fire killed approximately 1,500 people in the northeastern Wisconsin forest belt — the deadliest fire in recorded American history. The Great Chicago Fire killed approximately 300 people in Illinois and substantively destroyed central Chicago. The third firestorm of the same night — the Door Peninsula fire — killed approximately 150 people on the narrow Wisconsin peninsula that separates Green Bay from Lake Michigan.

The third fire is essentially forgotten.

The same conditions

All three fires arose from the same set of regional meteorological conditions. Wisconsin and northern Illinois had had an extreme drought through the summer of 1871; the standing forest litter was abnormally dry; the regional groundwater was below normal; the surface vegetation was substantially desiccated. The substantial proximate trigger was the same on all three fires: a strong cold-front passage on the afternoon and evening of 8 October 1871, which produced sustained westerly winds (gusting to perhaps 100 km/h) over the dry-fuel landscape.

The ignition sources were various and locally distributed. The Peshtigo and Door Peninsula fires substantively arose from multiple small slash-burning and land-clearing fires that the local farmers had been allowing to burn through the drought period; the wind shift connected the small fires into firestorms. The Chicago fire started from a single small barn fire — the Mrs O’Leary cow story is folklore, but the Bessey-DeKoven barn ignition is well-established — and was substantively amplified by the same wind into the citywide conflagration.

Williamsonville

The Door Peninsula fire’s worst single concentration of mortality came at Williamsonville — a small lumber-camp settlement on the central peninsula, approximately 30 km southeast of Sturgeon Bay. The Williamsonville community had approximately 76 inhabitants on the afternoon of 8 October 1871; the firestorm reached the village at approximately 9 pm; approximately 60 of the inhabitants died in the fast-moving fire that engulfed the village within minutes. Most of the fatalities were members of the Williamson family itself (the lumber-camp owner Tom Williamson, his wife Eliza, and extended-family members), with the remainder drawn from the mill workers and their families.

The subsequent Door Peninsula mortality came from the dispersed homesteads across the Belgian-Walloon farming community that had settled the central peninsula in the 1850s. Approximately 90 additional fatalities are recorded across the scattered settlements between Brussels and Sturgeon Bay. Total Door Peninsula mortality was approximately 150 dead.

Why it was forgotten

The Door Peninsula fire was substantively overshadowed by the simultaneous Peshtigo and Chicago events. The Chicago fire absorbed substantively the majority of the national-press attention through the subsequent weeks (a destroyed major American city, industrial-economic consequences for the substantive Midwestern economy). The Peshtigo fire absorbed the remaining regional Wisconsin attention (more deaths than Chicago, substantively a dramatic forest-fire narrative substantively well-suited to the American sublime-wilderness literary tradition).

The Door Peninsula was substantively the small third fire in the same news cycle. The local Door County newspapers covered the event in detail through the subsequent weeks, but the regional and national press substantively did not. The substantive Williamsonville community never substantively rebuilt to its pre-fire population; the site remained a small marker location for the remainder of the 19th century and disappeared from the standard American disaster-history record by the early 20th century.

The modern memorialisation of the Door Peninsula fire substantively dates from the 1971 centennial — the Wisconsin Historical Society’s documentation work produced the standing modern record. A small memorial sits at the site of Williamsonville. The dead are buried in a mass grave at the cemetery of the Brussels Belgian-Walloon Catholic parish.

Three fires on substantively the same night. Substantively only two are substantively remembered.