April 23, 2008: Chicago at night

[dar512]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned spontaneous combustion of the hay as a possible cause. It does happen from time to time.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by dar512

It does happen from time to time.

Even in the Cellar.

[dar512]

Originally Posted by glatt

Even in the Cellar.

So I see. What rotten luck for the Ducksnuts family. It's tough enough to make a living farming.

[Imigo Jones]

Originally Posted by dar512

I'm surprised no one has mentioned spontaneous combustion of the hay as a possible cause. It does happen from time to time.

Hey there, Dar. It's another possibility. If this were to be the case, the onus is back on poor Kate O'Leary for negligently inadequate storage and monitoring. This would make her about as personally responsible as leaving a lantern out where Daisy could knock it over.

From the reading you've provided, though, the hay would have to be pretty moist--"above 20-25% moisture content"--for its internal temp to rise enough to cause spontaneous combustion (nice monitoring technique, punching a probe into the hay and dropping a candy thermometer down it). On the one hand, you'd think that hay that had been cut and dried in the field, then baled or piled into a wagon, and transported into town might've dried out pretty well through all that handling. One also thinks "dry" when visualizing Daisy's lantern or Peg Leg's smoke igniting the hay.



The hay wasn't used just for dry bedding for the animals, of course, but also as feed. It's assumed, however, that the O'Learys had plain old hay and not silage, in which the moisture content is kept very high to encourage fermentation. "The ensiled product retains a much larger proportion of its nutrients than if the crop had been dried and stored as hay or stover. Silage is most often fed to dairy cattle, because they respond well to highly nutritious diets." Silage spoils without proper handling, and it seems unlikely to have been something poor 1871 city folks with just a low-tech barn (no silo etc.) would want to mess with.

.

On the other hoof, even if it was basic "dry" hay, the O'Leary's had a lot of hay, and it was farm fresh: "The O'Learys had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay to see them and their livestock {five cows, a calf, and a horse} through the winter"
(http://www.chicagohistory.org/fire/oleary/). According to theoretician Richard Bales, this was "at least two tons of hay." (At least he claims his name is "Bales" .) In terms of "square bales" we can picture, which weigh 40-80 (let's say 60) pounds each:
2 tons = 4,000 pounds = 240,000 bales of hay in the O'Learys' barn!
No, wait--I multiplied instead of divided .
2 tons = 66.666... bales .

That's a lot of hay! Stacked in one little barn, that's like transistors on a chip (and also where a limiting factor is overheating). A lot could go wrong.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I'd bet it was loose hay as baling wasn't around until the late 1800s and not widespread until the 1930s.

Mowing the hay, waiting for the sun to toast it to a golden brown, raking it into winrows, hand forking into stacks, then loading it onto a wagon and offloading in the barn, is a tedious process.

Add typical summer weather, with thunderstorms popping up with little or no warning, and it becomes a very hectic ballet. Putting hay away, a little on the wet side to beat a thunderstorm, is quite common, even with modern machinery that sped up the process considerably.

We always tried to spread greenish hay out over the hay mow, but that doesn't mean it will be completely dry before the the next load arrives, because of humidity and lack of circulation in the barn.

Oh, and two ton of hay ain't shit.... yet.

[Imigo Jones]

Thanks for the handy firsthand farmhand perspective, Bruce.



Shouldn't that be "heighth"?



Haystack Colonna :p

[Imigo Jones]

The City of Chicago has a great site I'd never seen before tonight, getting you close-up aerial photos and various maps, including, it seems, most of the real estate plats and building footprints in town. The aerial photo alone couldn't be posted, but here's the interactive page for the O'Leary homestead / Quinn (Chicago) Fire Academy site.

Jefferson is the unnamed street along the west edge. You can see the Weiner plaza sculpture marking the exact spot where the O'Leary barn stood. (Typing in any other address, you'll see that the site isn't centered in the map--the street is. The star is always placed in the street, so not on the actual site.)



Not from City of Chicago site, but kinda a daytime version of the OP view, and from closer to the Loop

Here's something weird with the footprint type of map (with building outlines): The academy building's footprint is given the address of "1310 S" Jefferson. Notice, though, that this is between 1010 S and 1113 S. The real 1310 S. Jefferson is a few blocks away, on the other side of Roosevelt (1200 S). Also, DeKoven is such a minor street, it doesn't even get its own outline.

Going for the plat doesn't show most of the details of this block, for some reason. You can see, though, how Jefferson has been widened (especially if you zoom out; solid line showing current street edge, dashed line showing former street and alley edges) to eat up most of the corner lot, reducing the distance between Jefferson and the O'Leary site.



Chicago History Museum diorama. In 1871, Michigan Ave. was actually on Lake Michigan. The city had blocked the Illinois Central Railroad from running tracks on this nice real estate, which it needed to get access from 12th Street (Roosevelt Road) to the mouth of the Chicago River. So, the railroad simply built its tracks on a causeway parallel to Michigan Avenue, the lake being under the jurisdiction of the more agreeable State of Illinois.

Rubble from the fire was thrown into the water between avenue and tracks, contributing mightily to the development of Grant Park (hafta check its history; I think some of the space between avenue and tracks had already been turned into a boating lagoon, but fire debris was the first fill). The tracks are still there, going under the Art Institute and Millenium Park. Go to this page and click "Previous" and "Next" for more of the diorama.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Check out these HDR photos of Chicago at night.