fire

Jan. 17, 1997 

Chicago Fire theory clears Mrs. O'Leary 

by Christi Parsons
Chicago Tribune 

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Catherine O'Leary was at home in bed - not milking
her infamous cow in the barn - when the Great Chicago Fire started on
Oct. 8, 1871. 

An official panel investigating the fire conducted a sloppy inquiry,
overlooking contradictory testimony and failing to follow up. 

And a review of the transcript from the inquiry, along with long-hidden
land records, points a finger of suspicion at an O'Leary neighbor named
Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan. 

Those are the conclusions of a research paper soon to be published in
the Illinois State Historical Society journal. 

The paper's author, Dick Bales, isn't the first to question the story of
Sullivan, who lived across the street and a few doors down from Mrs.
O'Leary. She, along with her cow, have long taken the blame for the
legendary fire, which leveled more than 3 square miles of the city. 

But Bales' account relies on documents never before examined by
researchers of the fire. 

Over the years, historians have wanted to map O'Leary's neighborhood in
its exact dimensions. But they had nothing more to go on than some old
photographs and newspaper reports of the time. Public records burned in
the fire. 

All along, however, Chicago Title Insurance has had tract records of the
city before the fire. But the documents have been available only to a
few real estate professionals. Thus they were available to Bales, a
lawyer for Chicago Title who also is an amateur historian. 

In recent months, as he read through the more than 1,000 pages of a
transcript from the fire inquiry hearings, his lawyerly suspicion turned
to Sullivan. 

Sullivan had said he was sitting in front of a neighbor's house when he
saw the fire in O'Leary's barn. But old photographs of the neighborhood
suggested that several homes would have blocked his view of the barn. 

Furthermore, Sullivan testified he ran to the barn, tried to free the
animals and then ran for help. Bales thought that seemed like a lot of
running for a man with a wooden leg. 

Using the tract-book records, Bales drew the whole block to scale. He
found that indeed a two-story house stood between Sullivan and the barn.

Also, the records show that Sullivan would have been sitting about 200
feet away from the barn. Experts concluded that the fire rapidly
consumed the barn. And Bales argued that Sullivan, who was severely
impaired, wouldn't have had time to hobble across the street "into a
burning barn full of hay and wood shavings, struggle to free the
animals, fall down but still ultimately free a calf without being
injured," as he testified he had done. 

The reason for Sullivan to lie? Bales theorized he had been in the barn
to feed his family's cow. There, he dropped a match, a pipe or a lantern
and started the blaze himself. 

Mrs. O'Leary, meanwhile, was in her house asleep, Bales argued. 

The most predominant theory has been that Catherine O'Leary's cow kicked
over a lantern and started the fire. Another is that one of her tenants
went to get some milk and knocked over the lantern. 

Copyright © 1997 The Seattle Times Company