On April 10, 1845, a seemingly ordinary day in Pittsburgh turned catastrophic when a single spark ignited a fire that would level about a third of the burgeoning city. Known as the Great Fire of 1845, this inferno burned for nearly seven hours, destroyed more than a thousand buildings and displaced roughly 12,000 people. It changed the trajectory of Pittsburgh, exposing the weaknesses of a fast-growing city and pushing it to rebuild.
A City of Wood and Flame
By 1845 Pittsburgh’s population topped 20,000, swelled by the crews completing the Pennsylvania Canal. Its growth had been haphazard, with the homes and businesses of wealthy residents jammed against tightly packed wooden buildings that housed its largely immigrant labor force. The mills and glassworks filled the air with soot, coal dust, flour dust and cotton fibers, and the city had gone six weeks without rain. The reservoir was “dangerously low,” and near-gale-force winds frequently hit the city at midday.
The city’s defenses were poor. Ten volunteer fire companies, more like social clubs than public services, relied on just two water mains for the entire city, and much of their hose had been condemned. (See our history of Pittsburgh’s glass industry and steel industry for the industries behind the soot.)
How the Fire Started
Shortly before noon on April 10, a fire left unattended on Ferry Street while heating wash water for the household of Colonel William Diehl sent a spark into a nearby ice shed or barn. Some accounts name the woman who left the fire as Ann Brooks; the origin has been told many ways, and Pittsburgh even held a contest in 1945 for the name of the “lady who started the fire.” Firefighters got only “a weak, sickly stream of muddy water” from their hoses. The flames spread to Diehl’s buildings and to the Globe Cotton Factory, then the wind veered to the southeast and gave the fire fresh strength.
Devastation in the Heart of Industry
Between about 2 and 4 p.m. the fire marched block by block through the mixed neighborhoods of Pittsburgh’s poor and wealthy. Estimates of the buildings destroyed range from roughly 1,000 to as many as 1,200, including homes, businesses, churches and factories. Property damage was estimated at between roughly $9 million and $12 million in 1845 dollars. By the next morning about a third of the city, some 60 acres, lay in ruins.
- The Bank of Pittsburgh, thought to be fireproof, fell when the heat shattered its windows and melted its zinc roof.
- The Monongahela House, called the “finest Hotel in the west,” was lost when its cupola caught fire.
- The wooden Monongahela Bridge, on the site of today’s Smithfield Street Bridge, was crowded with people fleeing south and burned in about 15 minutes, leaving only its piers. See Pittsburgh’s bridges.
- The Third Presbyterian Church was saved after its burning wooden cornice was dropped into the street, and its stone walls helped stop the spread to the north and west.
- The cupola of the Western University of Pennsylvania, the forerunner of the University of Pittsburgh, burned “like paper.”
The flames moved slowly enough that most people escaped with some belongings, and only two deaths are generally reported. Some fled to the then-undeveloped Hill District, which the fire never reached. Riverboats on the Monongahela that did not flee burned, while those on the Allegheny ferried refugees and brought men from Allegheny City to help. One hotel survived because firefighters blew up adjacent buildings with gunpowder to create a firebreak. Looting followed.
Relief and Rebuilding
The state legislature granted Pittsburgh $50,000, refunded taxes on destroyed buildings and gave the whole city a three-year break from taxes, though the lost revenue kept public schools closed. Public and private donations of almost $200,000 arrived from as far away as Louisiana and Europe. Local ministers and the mayor of neighboring Allegheny City declared the fire a judgment of God on the industrial city.
The first response was despair, but not for long. Burned-out property values soared and construction boomed: within two months, 400 to 500 new buildings had gone up in the burned district, built of better materials than the ones they replaced. Even so, wooden construction and the smoky air remained a problem. Pittsburgh’s volunteer fire companies also remained in place for years; the city did not adopt a paid fire department until 1870.
The market for replacement houses and household goods also stimulated the city’s industries, and the fire came to be remembered as having “spurred the city to greater growth,” an attitude encouraged by the city’s industrialists. That set the stage for the boom covered in our article on the Rise and Fall of Pittsburgh’s Steel Industry.
Cultural Impact and Forgotten Legacies
For about a century the Great Fire was the event by which Pittsburgh measured its history. Artists quickly produced lithographs, including prints by William Coventry Wall, Nathaniel Currier and James Baillie, and a crime novel, The Smoky City, appeared the same year. Every April 10 for decades the old city hall bell, now in the Heinz History Center’s Great Hall, rang out “1-8-4-5.” The ceremony faded by the 1990s, and the fire is rarely discussed today. World War II replaced it as the event by which the city’s story is told.
A stone marker on the building at 411 Smithfield Street, between Fourth and Forbes avenues, still reads: “These buildings form the bordering line of the burnt district of April 10th, 1845.” The Heinz History Center also keeps fire relics, including melted wrenches and scorched china that Pittsburghers kept as souvenirs.
Curious to explore more hidden chapters of the city’s story? Read about The History of the Pittsburgh Railroads and Union Station or How the Glass Industry Made Pittsburgh the Glass City, or see the fire in context in A Timeline of Pittsburgh’s History. Pittsburgh’s other great disasters are covered in the 1936 St. Patrick’s Day flood and the Johnstown Flood of 1889.
Sources: the Heinz History Center’s “Of Bells and Fire: Artifacts Recall April 10, 1845” (2016); the Wikipedia article on the Great Fire of Pittsburgh and the histories it cites, including Donald E. Cook Jr., “The Great Fire of Pittsburgh in 1845” (Western Pennsylvania History, 1968), and J. Heron Foster, A Full Account of the Great Fire at Pittsburgh (1845).
