View title: Franklin Street.
Series title: The Summer Street Fire; Boston, Nov. 9 and 10, 1872.
Description: I had some difficulty initially reconciling the title with a street that seems to aim directly toward Trinity Church. But on an 1867 street plan it does so near the intersection with Devonshire Street. And off course, the banks of debris cleared from the streets give only an approximation of the street themselves. This amount of clean-up suggests that several days may have past since the fire, but the rubble directly ahead seems to still be smouldering.
The Photographer: Charles Pollock.
The History:
Boston's Great Fire started in the elevator shaft of a building near the corner of Summer and Kingston Streets in the early evening of Nov. 9, 1872. It had spread to the upper stories by the time passers-by spotted it. From the very beginning, circumstances conspired to turn it into a disaster. Recent false alarms has prompted the city to put locks on the alarm boxes. Only policemen had keys, and one had to be found. A recent epidemic of equine flu had left the city, including its fire department, short of horses. Volunteers had to be found to pull fire wagons to the scene. Development, especially of the wool trade, had recently replaced residential housing with densely packed narrow streets of buildings in the new French style: brick or granite walls, but wooden mansard roofs. And all packed to the rafters with wool and other flammable materials. So the fire quickly spread. And when help and equipment arrived from other cities, and then from other states, a lack of standardization meant that many of those engine's hoses could not connect to Boston's hydrants.
By the time it was brought under control the following day, a large part of Boston's business district had been destroyed. Some 65 acres and almost 800 buildings had been laid waste. Fortunately nearly all of Boston's photographer's studios were just outside the Burnt District, so they were quickly on the scene capturing images of the ruins. This is one of hundreds of stereoviews that were made after the fire.
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