Similar to last week’s fires that ripped through the island of Maui, in Hawaii, killing at least 106 people and razing the historic town of Lahaina, the 1871 Peshtigo fire was amplified by extreme winds and an unusually dry season that primed vegetation to spread the blaze. The fire ravaged the Wisconsin town rapidly. “It rained fire; the air was on fire,” one survivor wrote in a letter. “Some thought the last day had come.”
For many, it had. In an hour, the town of Peshtigo is said to have been virtually wiped off the map. It is estimated that some 1,200 people died — 800 in Peshtigo alone — as the fire blazed through 17 towns on both sides of Green Bay, burning more than a million acres.
Despite the mass destruction, America’s most lethal wildfire has long been overlooked, overshadowed by the Great Chicago Fire, which erupted that same night in 1871 and consumed public attention.
As the rising death toll reported from Maui saw it become the deadliest U.S. wildfire of the past century, the devastating events in Peshtigo carried renewed significance.
Even with technological advances in firefighting systems, increasingly severe, mass-casualty fires are still occurring in the United States. The Lahaina fire is the most recent example, and before that, the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85.
The effects of climate change are also likely to create conditions — dry spells, more intense storms — that could worsen fires in the future, making the horrors of the past an important guide.
“I think that most people have no clue about the Peshtigo fire and it’s one of the most deadly natural disasters in U.S. history,” said Chris Dicus, a professor of wildland fire management at California Polytechnic State University. More than a century later, “we’re doing many of the same things that we were doing back in 1871,” he said, such as continuing to build with fire-prone materials in fire-prone areas.
The Maui fires have parallels to Peshtigo, he said. “Whether it’s Peshtigo, Black Saturday in Australia, or the Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County, California, there were extreme winds that pushed the fire very rapidly through dry grasses,” he said, referring to historic blazes in 2009 and 2017. “When it hit the towns, it was just building-to-building spread.”
These severe fires were also worsened by a lack of communication. “Many people had no idea that there was even a fire happening until it was right on their doorstep,” Dicus said.