Great Boston Fire of 1872
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
The Great Boston Fire of 1872 was a two-day conflagration that began to burn on November 9, 1872 on Lincoln Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It destroyed about 65 acres (263,000 m²) of city, 776 buildings, much of the financial district and caused $73.5 million in damage. Fourteen people died in the fire.
Boston's building regulations, water supply, and fire department should have been adequate to prevent the fire; however, the fire department could not get its engines to the site of what should have been a localized blaze due to the fact that almost all of the fire department's horses were dead or sick from an equine epidemic. In a very real sense, sick horses were the root cause of the fire.
When the fire occurred, the area was mainly residential. After the fire, the burned district became a center for the expansion of the growing business community in Boston. The fire district is now Boston's financial district. In a strange way, this great fire is one of the events that led to the fast growth of Boston at the end of 1800's.
