CANARYVILLE — Everyone remembers the Great Chicago Fire, the 1871 blaze that left an estimated 300 people dead and 100,000 homeless.
But there’s another Chicago fire that’s often forgotten.
Firefighters battling the Morris and Co. fire in the Union Stockyards [Chicago History Museum]
On Dec. 22, 1910, while battling a ferocious fire inside the Morris and Co. meatpacking plant at the Union Stockyards, 21 Chicago firefighters were crushed to death when a wall collapsed.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Stockyards tragedy was the deadliest building collapse involving firefighters in the nation's history.
“When the fire broke out, it was uncontrollable from the start,” said Libby Mahoney, a historian at the Chicago History Museum. “It required so many firemen so quickly, and it couldn’t be put out.”
Long before the 1910 fire widowed and orphaned many mothers, sons and daughters, fires were a common occurrence at the Union Stockyards. Inside these plants were flammables like grease and wood. All it took was a spark, or, in the case of the infamous Stockyards fire, a shorted electrical socket.
“It was a caldron ready to explode,” Mahoney said, “and that’s what it did.”
In his book about the blaze, “Chicago’s Forgotten Tragedy,” retired Chicago firefighter Bill Cosgrove shared the details of that tragic day.
Around 4 a.m., firefighters arrived outside Warehouse 7 of the Nelson Morris and Co. meatpacking plant at 44th Street and Loomis Avenue and found black smoke billowing from a loading dock next to the building.
The call proved difficult from the very beginning. There was only one way to battle the flames: Stand on a loading dock covered by an old, wooden canopy and aim the hose at the heart of the fire.
“With a seven story brick building on one side, and a line of railroad boxcars that butted up to the loading dock, the canopy above it formed a tunnel-like effect,” wrote Cosgrove, who served as a technical advisor to Robert De Niro during the filming of the 1991 blockbuster “Backdraft.”
“Arriving engines were stretching hose lines down the railroad tracks and then under the box cars in an effort to have a better vantage point.”
At 5:05 a.m., Chief Fire Marshal James Horan arrived on the scene.
Fire Chief James Horan, walking past a building at a fire. [Chicago History Museum]
Horan ordered firefighters from two trucks companies — 11 and 18 — to axe open the plant’s door. And he had two other men check the condition of the wooden canopy.
Smoke blinded the firefighters. Intense heat smothered them. They fought on.
Before the building collapsed, there was little warning — just a “deep groan” from within the burning plant.
“The force of the collapse was so great, it not only crushed the canopy,” Cosgrove wrote, “but it knocked several of the boxcars clean off their tracks, and onto their sides.”
The collapse killed three civilians and 21 firefighters, including Horan, whose initialed hat is now in the archives of the Chicago History Museum.
Those firefighters are now remembered as the “Fallen 21.”
“It’s one of those very tragic episodes in Chicago history that’s been forgotten,” Mahoney said.
On Dec. 22, 2004, city officials dedicated the Chicago Stockyard Fire Memorial near Peoria Street and Exchange Avenue: An 8-foot-tall bronze and aluminum sculpture and a “Wall of Honor” bearing the names of Chicago firefighters and paramedics who have died in the line of duty.
A monument to the firefighters who died in the 1910 Stockyards fire. [DNAinfo/Ed Komenda]
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