In the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, 3 square miles burned, 300 people were killed and 100,000 were left homeless. In the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906, 80 percent of the city, about 490 city blocks, was destroyed, killing about 3,000 people.

And in 1889, the fledgling city of Durango suffered its largest fire ever, burning more than six blocks, causing $500,000 worth of damage and leaving at least 100 families homeless. While no one was killed in the Southwest Colorado fire, it was proportionately as destructive as the Chicago and San Francisco fires.

Today is the 125th anniversary of the conflagration that could have meant the end of Durango, had city residents and businessmen not been determined to rebuild.

“There are definitely people who thought the fire was a blessing in disguise,” said Robert McDaniel, former executive director of the Animas Museum. “It got rid of shoddily built wooden structures, and they were replaced with stone and brick buildings. (Former Durango Fire Department Fire Marshal) Frank Shry used to call it urban renewal.”

When the Durango Trust originally laid out Durango, it stipulated that the new town was to be built of stone and bricks, partly because of the great danger that fire presented to frontier towns, and partly because Durango was to be a real town, not a temporary mining camp. But so many people flocked to the area, with its promises of prosperity, that most of the buildings were quickly constructed with highly flammable wood and canvas.

Because of the smoke produced by Durango’s industries – the train, the smelter and a small power plant – at the southern end of Main, most businesses at the time were located north of Ninth Street, McDaniel said.

The fire

Durangoans woke up July 1, 1889, to a day much like that which is predicted for today: hot and windy.

“Even if they weren’t in a drought like we are, if they had just had typical weather, June is the driest month of the year,” McDaniel said. “It’s a prime time to have fires most years.”

Proving his point, Monday was the 60th anniversary of another big fire, the Miller Motor Fire, where firefighters Elzie Briggs and Louis Hoffman were killed.

The fire started at the northwest corner of Main Avenue and 10th Street, where the Jarvis Building is now. It was a fruit and candy store owned by Mr. Ricker at the time, and the fire may have started with a hot stove, although rumors of a “fire fiend” ran rampant.

Durango City Hall was just half a block away, and it was directly in the path of the flames.

“The city had just bought a new Silsby fire pumper,” McDaniel said, “but they never even got it out of the fire bay.”

Also lost when City Hall burned was the town’s new public library, which featured books donated by members of the Reading Club of Durango. While much of what was lost in the fire would be quickly rebuilt, it was 17 years until the town would have another public library.

The fire quickly moved northeast, burning most of the 1000 and 1100 blocks on Main, moving up to East Second Avenue, where it burned the La Plata County Courthouse and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and then over to East Third Avenue where it destroyed the Presbyterian and Methodist churches and a number of homes.

“Panicked residents fled to the mesa (where Fort Lewis College is now located),” Duane Smith described the scene in his book Rocky Mountain Boomtown, “carrying items gathered in haste. In horror, they watched a ‘terrific’ wind push the fire from Main Avenue over to the Boulevard – stores, saloons, churches, homes fell to the flames. Sinners and saints alike saw their property go up in smoke.”

The median on East Third Avenue, popularly called the Boulevard, did not yet have trees planted in it, a disappointment to the female residents who wanted the town to have a more “civilized” appearance, but it turned out to be a blessing that day.

“Third was such a wide boulevard, and it didn’t have many trees yet, that it acted as a firebreak,” McDaniel said. “That’s good because I imagine the best they could muster would be a bucket brigade.”

Helen M. Boston Searcy and her friend Stella Russell were playing croquet near 17th Street when the fire broke out. They ran down as far as the railroad tracks trying to see what was happening. Searcy remembered it well when she wrote her memories down 50 years later:

“The wind was blowing a gale; billowing smoke from flames shooting high in the air from the burning frame buildings obscured the sun like a dark day.”

Searcy’s father, Jacob A. Boston, was one of Durango’s early photographers. His studio, on Main just north of 11th Street, was burned to the ground. Like many others who lost businesses and homes that day, he did not have insurance.

“We have a copy of the paper the day after the fire at the Animas Museum,” McDaniel said. “It’s just column after column of people who lost businesses and homes, what the value was, who had insurance ...”

‘One of most promising’

While there is no question the fire was devastating to Durango, residents raised $1,200 in an hour the next day to help those most impoverished by the fire. They announced they would rebuild.

News of the fire quickly spread across the country, with Harper’s Weekly reporting, “The fire that destroyed a considerable part of Durango, Colorado, on Monday of last week has checked for a time the commercial activity of one of the most promising of the younger cities of the far West. As in other cases of a similar character, however, this calamity may prove to be the best thing that could have occurred to make Durango’s business blocks equal in size and appearance to those of Denver and Pueblo.”

Within three years, Main had taken on a new appearance, but some areas were rebuilt more quickly than others. The lots immediately north of Olde Tymer’s Café remained vacant almost 60 years, until circa 1950, when the three buildings, including those that house Radio Shack and Carver Brewing Co., were built.

The fire also led to another improvement.

“Our professional fire department also came about because of that fire,” McDaniel said. “They still used a lot of volunteers because there were only a handful of guys in it, but it was a big change.”

Many of the buildings constructed after the fire still stand today and led to Main Avenue being named to the National Historic Register.

abutler@durangoherald.com. Robert McDaniel’s story about Helen Boston Searcy’s recollections for Crosscurrents Magazine was a source for this story.