Fwoomp! There It Was: Seattle Burned 120 Years Ago

June 6, 1889: Seattle aped "world-class cities" such as Chicago, London, Boston, and Peshtigo, WI, by losing our entire downtown to a fire.

One person died in the fire, but conventional wisdom is that the conflagration was a blessing in disguise: Within a year, Seattle's population had doubled to nearly 40,000 people; and downtown was rebuilt, this time out of fire-and big-bad-wolf-proof brick and stone.

A few more Great Fire facts:

• Swedish immigrant John Back accepted blame for starting the fire. Some glue he was heating on a stove caught fire.
• The Post-Intelligencer published that day even though they lost their building and their printing press to the flames.
• Seattle's fire chief was attending a fire-fighting convention in San Francisco at the time of the blaze. Bystanders heckled the firefighters while their efforts proved uneffective; the all-volunteer force quit later that year and Seattle created a professional fire department.
• The aftermath taught Rudyard Kipling something. He visited and said downtown was now “a horrible black smudge, as though a Hand had come down and rubbed the place smooth. I know now what being wiped out means.”
• Seattle started a trend: Vancouver, Ellensburg, and Spokane also lost large chunks of their business districts to Great Fires that summer.
• Given that the population boost made Seattle the state's largest city and an attractive terminus for the Great Northern Railroad, Tacoma might have regretted sending us $20,000 and a relief committee. ("Lucky Ducky!")

Hat tip to jhoole, who reminded us of the anniversary this morning on Twitter.