Chapter 7: Skokie's Great Fire of 1910

(Credit is due to Mr. George Blameuser for the greater part of this fire story. It is inevitable that an account taken orally in a number of personal interviews, should collect an assortment of gaps and conflicts. Before writing this chapter, the author had to make a long-distance SOS call, and Mr. Blameuser's help in ironing out the wrinkles is much appreciated.)

The Niles Center fire of 1910 has been called the miniature of the Great Chicago Fire because of several similar aspects:

• Both fires were in October after a prolonged period of drought.
• The town was tinder waiting for a spark.
• Both fires originated in a stable.

The barn in which this blaze began belonged to a Mr. Wolfe and was on the west side of Lincoln north of Oakton. A strong southeast wind whipped the fire along that side of the street.

As yet there was no water system in the village. Every house had its own well and cistern. The Volunteer Fire Department relied upon the bucket brigade method. All able-bodied men took a hand, passing buckets or sopping roofs with mops and brooms from pails hauled up by rope. The department had a hand pumper to draw water from a cistern, but, with so many buildings afire at once, such equipment was pitifully inadequate.

Calls for help were sent to Morton Grove and Niles, and they contributed their volunteer departments, though they, too, were largely dependent on bucket-passing.

Then the call for help reached Evanston and Chicago. They responded with an engine and a company apiece. They laid their hoses to the lagoon belonging to the Peter Blameuser family, west of their large old home across the street from the present location of the Public Library. Without the little body of water the town doubtless would have been doomed. The fire lasted from afternoon until evening of the next day and left a block and a half of the business district smoldering.

This had been a market day with its usual motley throng of outsiders. As though officials did not already have trouble aplenty, they had to contend with looting.

Those citizens whose buildings were in the probable path of the blaze began setting their furniture or stock out on the walks to be carted to safety an ideal arrangement in the minds of the light-fingered ones among the crowd. So it was necessary to deputize men to guard what the fire didn't take.

After the disaster discussion began in earnest on the need for a water supply.

The first system was an artesian well on Niles Avenue at the present Searle Parkway. It was drilled through hardpan and solid rock to a depth of 1400 feet. A water tank above it held 25,000 gallons. The tank was taken down in the middle 1930s, but the well now furnished Searle with water for air conditioning and sprinkling.

In the late 1920s a pipeline was laid from Chicago, bringing Lake Michigan into the faucets of Niles Center. The first home to have running water was the Klehms', the rambling house known to older residents as the "Swedish Castle" in the 8200 block on Lincoln Avenue, now occupied by the American Legion.

Sewage a Problem

Running water necessitated a sewer system.

Sewage disposal was a real problem, for Niles Center had no stream such as Nature had provided to Morton Grove and Niles. The Drainage Canal had been opened for use in January 1900, but the east boundary of Niles Center was still the Northwestern tracks, leaving a two-mile strip of unincorporated territory between the village and the canal.

The town was advised to install a septic tank, but the idea met with citizens' disfavor, and the problem of diverting sewage to the canal was taken up with Cook County. Much legal work had to be done to obtain rights from property owners on that strip of land. It was nearly a decade after the fire that the sewers were completed and connected with the Sanitary District system.

Since 1952 virtually all of Skokie receives its drink of water through Evanston. That city has a thoroughly modern plant on the lakefront, with pipes reaching out 5000 feet into the lake, 30 feet under its surface. Its purification follows the most recent scientific methods.

So disaster eventually brought improvement and modernization. With water from the city and sewage through the canal the as yet beneficent shadow of Chicago had reached this far.

- Originally published in The Villager, Thursday, June 26, 1958, p. 15

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