The Great Fire of Emmitsburg
Robert
M. Preston
A host of social
historians in the last couple of decades have studied
the social, economic, and geographical mobility of
Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century.’
Most of these studies have centered on growing
industrial urban centers with massive immigrant
populations. As Richard Jensen pointed out at the 1976
Organization of American Historians Convention,
historians are perhaps Concentrating a disproportional
amount of time, energy, and attention on a very small
segment of the population.
The cities of Philadelphia,
Salem, Kingston, Pittsburgh and Poughkeepsie have all
been scrutinized in major studies that have contributed
much to our knowledge of nineteenth century urban life.
But each of these cities had an 1860 population of
13,000 or more, and each was among the seventy-five
largest cities in America. The problem with
concentrating upon such populous areas is that less than
fifteen percent of the population in 1860 lived in such
places.
If historians are to understand America in the
twentieth century, the appreciation of the
urban-experience is imperative. And thus to study such
cities is important. But to understand the experience of
the majority of the American population in the late
nineteenth century, to understand the many and not just
the few, one must study small towns—towns with
populations below 2,500. Eighty percent of Americans
lived in such areas or towns. Emmitsburg, Maryland was
such a town.
Emmitsburg was a small, rural,
pre-industrial town in 1860 with a population of 973
persons, ninety-seven percent of whom were native-born.
This study of Emmitsburg measures the effect of the same
social and economic factors, such as familial,
occupational, and property ownership status, on mobility
that social historians have analyzed in their work with
nineteenth century large, industrial, immigrant crowded
cities. In addition to this, however, the factor of a
catastrophic event, such as the Great Fire of
Emmitsburg, is considered in relation to mobility.
The Great Fire of Emmitsburg
started in the loft of the Beam and Guthrie Livery
Stable about eleven o’clock on Monday night, 15 June
1863. According to town gossip, the fire was the work of
an arsonist, the "mean devil" Eli Smith.’
The fire spread eastward along Main Street until it
reached the town’s Square and then continued for two
blocks, jumped Main Street and then burned westward
toward the Square again. This left three of the four
corners of the town’s Square blackened by fire. In
all, twenty-eight houses and nine business
establishments were damaged or destroyed.
The last
structure to burn was the town’s largest hotel. This
hotel, along with a few other inns in Emmitsburg, were
integral parts of the town’s economy. Emmitsburg, a
north central Maryland town, was situated along one of
the main commercial arteries between the growing
industrial city of Baltimore and Pittsburgh, one of
America's gateways to the agricultural west. Many wagons
from east and west stopped at Emmitsburg. Of the 168
skilled and semi-skilled workers in Emmitsburg in 1860,
thirty-two, or nineteen percent, were employed in
transportation as wagon markers, wheelwrights,
blacksmiths, saddlers, and drivers.
Not only did the fire interrupt
this economic life of the town, but it's effect on
individuals was awesome. One hundred and eighty-nine
persons, or about twenty percent of the town's
population, were victimized by the fire through the loss
of homes, furnishing, farm animals, business
inventories, or business establishments. Forty-two fire
victims who were property owners suffered losses
totaling almost $82,000 or twenty-two percent of the
value of all the property (real and personal) owned by
citizens of Emmitsburg in 1860. After ranging all night,
the fire was finally brought under control after dawn
with the help of the townspeople and students from
nearby Mount Saint Mary’s College and Seminary. The
placement of wet blankets on the roof of the building on
the only corner of the Square that did not burn was
credited with the containment of the fire.
The great fires of history in
ancient Rome, in Civil War Atlanta, in Chicago, and in
hundreds of other towns and cities have destroyed lives,
properties, and hopes. But until social historians
developed in the last decade and a half the method of
analyzing mobility, the study of the effects of
catastrophic events on the victims could not be easily
accomplished. Indeed, the discovery of the massive 1860’s
migration from Emmitsburg alone could easily lead one-to
conclude that the catastrophic Great Fire caused this
migration. However, after applying the same mobility
methodology to the study of Emmitsburg in the 1860’s
that other historians have applied to the analysis of
mobility in cities, such as Pittsburgh, Salem, Boston,
Northampton, etc., it becomes obvious that social and
economic factors, rather than the Great Fire, were the
dominant causes of geographical mobility in Emmitsburg
in the 1860s.
Migration from Emmitsburg caused
the town’s population to fall twenty-seven percent
from 983 in 1860 to 706 in 1870. That decline
represented more than simply 267 persons leaving
Emmitsburg in the decade of the 1860’s. By tracing the
migration history of the adult males listed in the 1860
Census, we find that. seventy-one percent of them did
not reappear in the 1970 Census. If we can assume that
the entire population was moving in a manner similar to
the adult male population, then we can calculate the
minimum number of persons who moved in and out of
Emmitsburg in the 1860’s.
Seventy-one percent of the
adult males left Emmitsburg during the 1860’s out of a
population of 983. This means that 691 persons left
Emmitsburg in the 1860’s and 424 had to move into
Emmitsburg for the population to reach 706 by 1870. Thus
1,115 persons moved in and out of Emmitsburg in the
decade. This is only an estimated minimum, because those
that moved in and out between the census years (as did
seven of the property owning fire victims) are not
considered.
This massive 1860’s migration
of Emmitsburg townspeople, however, included only a
minority of those who were directly affected by the
Great Fire. Presumably, one would think, since the town
experienced a massive migration, the victims of the fire
would be numbered among the migrants. After tracing the
history of the thirty two families who were present in
Emmitsburg in 1860 and who were victimized by the Great
Fire, one finds that less than a third (31%) actually
left Emmitsburg within seven years after the fire. This
is contrasted sharply with the nearly three-quarters
(71%) of the town’s adult population as a whole who
left.
The sixty-nine percent of the
fire victims who remained in Emmitsburg throughout the
1860’s had reported in 1860 that the value of their
property was $45,400. In the 1863 fire, they lost
$32,900 worth of that property, or seventy-two percent
of their 1860 property. Despite the huge loss, though,
they remained. Other similar studies may in the future
reveal that Emmitsburg is not a unique example of a town
that experienced a catastrophe, but that did not see
that catastrophe cause a major migration, at least of
the catastrophe’s victims.
Beyond this, however, a
comparison of the fire victims to the population of the
town as a whole suggests that the victims possessed
certain social and economic characteristics that may
have lead most to see a bright future in Emmitsburg,
even while they were standing in the smoldering embers
of their ruined past. Numerous studies by social
historians have centered on a set of social and economic
traits that can be considered to be causes of
persistence or migration. Occupation, wealth, and
familial status have all previously been identified as
characteristics that distinguished those who left a city
or town, from those who remained.
During the 1860’s in
Emmitsburg there was, first of all, a similarity between
the adult male fire victims who remained and the adult
males in the town population as a whole who remained.
Both a majority of the fire victims and adult males in
the town who remained were heads of households and
property owners.
There is also similarity between
the fire victims who remained and all adult males in the
town who remained in regard to occupation
classification. Eighty-four percent of the fire victims
who remained were professional or skilled workers. There
were farmers, doctors, druggists, teachers, justices of
the peace, merchants, tavern owners, shoemakers,
carpenters, hatters, wheelwrights, plasterers,
machinists and blacksmiths among them.
In the town
population in general these were the types of workers
that produced the highest persistency rates. In fact
forty percent of all professionals, merchants, farmers,
clerical and skilled workers remained in Emmitsburg in
the 1860’s. On the other hand only seventeen percent
of the semiskilled and unskilled workers, and unemployed
remains. Again the characteristics of the fire victims
who remained match those of the adult males in the
population as a whole who remained more closely than
those of the townspeople who left Emmitsburg.
The minority of fire victims who
left within the 1860’s and thus joined the majority of
townspeople on the road out of Emmitsburg were in some
ways similar to the fire victims who remained. They too
were property owners, heads of households, and numbered
among the ranks of the skilled craftsmen and
professionals. As such it may appear that they
"should have" stayed in Emmitsburg, if social
and economic factors were dominant, rather than the
catastrophic fire, as the cause for migration. But a
sampling of the circumstances faced by the fire victims
who Left suggests that even strong social and economic
factors are occasionally overridden.
Damel Wile, for instance, had
been the owner of the large hotel on the Square, the
last structure to burn in the fire. If he concluded that
Emmitsburg was a jinx for him, most would agree. He, his
wife, Mary. and their children, Anna and Henry, moved to
Emmitsburg in the 1850’s. His family continued to grow
but his luck did not. In 1856 or 1857 Wile purchased the
City Hotel. A few days after the purchase, the former
owner and he were looking at a gun. The gun accidentally
discharged and Wile was shot through the neck. After
recovering, he decided to raze the hotel and build a new
four-story structure. Four years later the Great Fire of
Emmitsburg destroyed it, causing $10,000 worth of
damage.
Some fire victims who left, soon
returned to Emmitsburg. George Beam, for instance, whose
farm animals and horses were destroyed in the stable
where the fire started, left Emmitsburg after the fire,
but returned during the 1870’s and continued his
livery stable business into the twentieth century.
Another who returned was William Patterson, a medical
doctor whose office was on one of the three corners of
the town Square that was destroyed. He was sixty-one at
the time of the fire. Soon after leaving Emmitsburg he
returned in the 1870’s and died in Emmitsburg in 1876.
Joshua Shorb is counted among
those who left after the fire, but more than likely he
did not leave because of the fire. He incurred a $4,000
loss when the fire destroyed his machine shop and
foundry. But he rebuilt his business and not until 1868,
four years after the fire, moved his business to
Westminster, a town east of and much larger than
Emmitsburg.
Some, like Charles Shorb, did
seem to leave town in response to the catastrophe.
Charles Shorb was just thirty-one at the time of the
fire, but he and his wife had amassed considerable
wealth, most of it invested in his store’s inventory.
In the fire he lost $12,000, or one half of his 1860
wealth. Shorb and his wife, in fact, lost more than any
other fire victim. Possibly this motivated them to leave
the town that once gave them a fortune, and then
misfortune.
But Charles Shorb and a few
others were quite clearly in the minority. Most with
social and economic backgrounds similar to Shorb’s
remained in town throughout the 1860’s, whether or not
they had been fire victims.
There is one possible economic
explanation for why certain fire victims left
Emmitsburg, and others did not. The type of property
lost may account for why some migrated and others
remained. While about the same proportion. of those that
left lost houses in comparison to those who remained,
one half of those who left lost their business
establishments and inventories in the fire, as opposed
to less than a quarter of those who remained.
Because so
few of the fire victims left, the sample may be too
small to draw any definitive conclusions. But attention
to such an economic factor as the type of property lost
would be wise in other studies of catastrophes. The fact
remains, nonetheless, that the majority of fire victims
remained and at the same time matched the social and
economic characteristics of those in the populations as
a whole who remained in Emmitsburg during the 1860’s.
In his dramatic conclusion to
his section on the Great Fire, James A. Helman, author
of the History of Emmitsburg, Maryland,
wrote:
"Oh, the desolation a fire makes; most of the
people lost their all, and never recovered."
Helman was a twenty-three year old resident of
Emmitsburg at the time of the Great Fire. It is
difficult, and perhaps presumptuous, for an historian
over a century after the event to say that an eyewitness
was wrong. But such is the arrogance of the historian!
Of the forty-two who lost
property in the fire, most lost much, and most
recovered. Or at least most of those who remained
recovered. By 1870, just seven years after the fire,
three-quarters of those who remained were doing as well
or better than they were in 1860, according to the value
of their property. By 1870 only two who remained seem to
have suffered unrecoverable losses. Patrick Kelly, the
highly successful tailor who had done much work for the
students and teachers at Mount Saint Mary’s College,
lost his property in the fire and by 1870, still owned
no real estate, although his personal property was
valued at $2,000, which made him one of the more
successful men in town in 1870.
Kelly was growing old,
and by 1872 would be dead. The other fire victim who did
not seem to recover was Francis Smith, a German
immigrant who owned King’s Tavern in 1860, but who was
property less by 1870. However, while some of his
property was lost in the fire, the Tavern had not been
destroyed, so apparently he lost it after the fire, and
probably unrelated to the fire. Of those who left
Emmitsburg, it is difficult to say whether they
recovered or not. Some, however, as indicated above,
were soon back in business and on the road to recovery.
The personal progress that each
fire victim would have experienced in the 1860’s, if
the fire had not occurred, can never be known. But with
the use of the mobility methodology that social
historians have developed in recent decades, the actual
progress the fire victims did experience can be known.
The Great Fire of Emmitsburg was not a major factor
causing migration for fire victims. Instead, as the
above evidence indicates, social position, such as one’s
position as head of a household, and economic position,
such as one’s occupation and status as a property
owner, were more important factors in determining
whether someone, regardless of whether one has
personally suffered the tragedy of a catastrophe, would
remain or leave one’s home town.
Richard Jensen’s comments at
the 1976 Organization of American Historians’
convention about the need for historians to study small
nineteenth century towns are valuable. And possibly they
are prophetic. For as this study illustrates, the very
factors that were involved in the massive migration from
and within large, industrial, immigrant-crowded cities
were also operative in at least one small,
pre-industrial, rural town, whose population was
ninety-seven percent native-born.
And these factors were even
operative in the face of a major catastrophe, such as
the 1863 Great Fire of Emmitsburg, Maryland.
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