The
chimney caught fire at lunch. In 2,000 homes this day, dinner never
came.
Before even the turn of appetite, the greatest fire ever to
savage a city in the South destroyed the meaningful part of
Jacksonville.
An afternoon of terror reduced 146 blocks of our town to a
seething ruin of living ash and dead animals, devastated lives and
ruined dreams.
Fifteen thousand people fled for their lives in a firestorm of
horror, of flame and smoke, wild rumor and stark confusion.
Dusk found nearly 10,000 huddled destitute and homeless by the
fire's fringe, a sunken-eyed mass under "a weird light that never
before shone on land or sea."
"The softest cheek ever nourished by Caucasian blood seems yellow
and drawn under the firelight," wrote newspaperman Benjamin
Harrison.
|
Residents flee The
Great Fire on May 3, 1901, taking whatever belongings they
could. The blaze left 8,677 homeless and seven dead.
-- Florida State Archives
|
"The blackest
African flushes into saffron and the eyes emit a gleam that seems
borrowed from the cat's eye."
Harrison's Acres of Ashes provided a contemporary narrative of
the blaze. It was a slim volume published by James A. Holloman,
night editor of The Florida Times-Union and Citizen.
Above the homeless mass, amid the glow of irretrievable ruin,
floated an anguished hum, a murmur never articulate.
"Sometimes it has the hard tone of remonstrance with heaven for
the cruelty of the visitation," Harrison wrote.
"Sometimes many join in the crooning of a camp-meeting hymn.
Often there is the shriek of a mother separated from a child in the
terror of the time."
"The agony must find vent."
Between noon and twilight on Friday, May 3, 1901, fire forged
Jacksonville for 100 years to come.
The chimney had caught fire before. E.E. Cleaveland had seen it,
barely 20 feet away from his Cleaveland Fibre Factory, located in
the block bounded by Beaver, Union and Davis Streets, then the
extreme northwestward limit of the city.
Burning chimneys, sparks and flying soot were common sights among
the pine shanties of LaVilla, the hardscrabble swatch west of
Jacksonville.
Thus, little weight was given the first spark of the Great Fire
of 1901.
"This was a frequent experience," said Cleaveland the day after a
fiery atom landed by chance on Spanish moss at his plant and
incinerated an entire city.
"Once or twice before the fiber on the drying platform has been
set afire with falling soot from the chimney and the cottage," the
plant proprietor told the press.
Material from the vats filled the large platform fronting on
Davis Street and taking up a half of the block. The pine shanties
behind the building and throughout La Villa posed a combustible
threat, not the least to themselves. Many had what writer Benjamin
Harrison called "chimneys of wonderful design, but nearly all
defective in much."
Harrison noted as well it was common for sparks to fly from the
chimneys of LaVilla.
The factory, indeed, employed a watchman to look out for the
casual fires and other untoward incidents. A hose connected to a
water tower was nearby.
On this drought-dry spring noon there was little wind, so the
watchman took his ease with the other workman at lunch hour. They
lounged on theplatform amid piles of fresh-ginned moss.
The
platform was large, nearly 200 feet square and built 12 feet above
the ground. Two small dwellings to the south and west of the
sprawling floor were within easy reach for a vagrant spark.
A shaken Cleaveland spoke the next day to a reporter from the
morning newspaper, The Florida Times-Union and Citizen, from a
nearby furniture store Cleaveland also owned. The store was
undamaged by the blaze, while all in view to the east and south lay
in imponderable, smoldering ruin.
"The men knocked off for dinner and were lying around in the
shade, either eating their dinner or resting," he said. The routine
this dry, hot Friday was no different than that of hundreds of lazy
noons before; none suspected it would be different than hundreds of
days to come.
A workman whose name is lost to history saw the smoke coming from
moss ginned that morning and the afternoon before.
Two men took buckets of water and went to extinguish the fire.
Had it been a two-bucket job, the course of Jacksonville's history
would have continued on its path. But for a third bucket that
worked, how different might have grown our town over these 100
years.
"This having happened before, no importance was attached to it,
more than ordinarily," Cleaveland said.
Suddenly there was a scurry of breeze, and with the sudden wind
smoke rose from the platform. A workman sloshed a bucket of water
over the smoke and moss and "put the fire out," Harrison wrote.
But the gods of destruction were not to be denied.
"While so doing [the workman] noticed that little blazes glowed
in the mass of fiber and he called for help ... The other workmen
went to his assistance and bucket after bucket of water was piled on
-- to no purpose. The first breath of the coming wind swept over the
yard, the fragments caught fire and the fire ran with the speed of
powder flashes."
In the beginning, the Great Jacksonville Fire ignited only on the
platform. But the imps of hell were loosed.
"Every effort that could be made to put out the fire was made,
but the strong wind and the dryness of everything was too much for
the men at the factory," Cleaveland said. "The fat-pine buildings
and the flying burning shingles made it impossible to control the
fire."
As the now-alarmed workers struggled with the living flames,
blazing fragments followed debris into the main building of the
Cleaveland Fibre Factory.
"Here they found fresh material on the floor and in the racks --
the great room was immediately a mass of flames and the alarm of the
fire was sent in," Harrison wrote.
It was 12:35 p.m.
|
Drought, wind and
buildings constructed of flammable pine all conspired to
unleash The Great Fire. Here, burning Spanish moss spreads the
flames across the city.
--Jacksonville Historical
Society
|
Even as firemen
arrived, Cleaveland knew all was lost.
"The engines came on the run. The firemen were at work before the
horses stopped. Streams were poured on the flames."
The drought had been too prolonged. The building was of pitch
pine. Its roof was made of shingle, combustible as tinder. The wind
had inexplicably risen, as if it were for evil purpose.
"Water evaporated or seemed but fuel to the flames," Harrison
wrote.
Fitful gusts blew over the fiber factory and surged throughout
the city. Their dangerous breath carried the first scent of smoke
and doom over a city barely awakening to the danger.
And then a new horror was added to the calamity for which no one
was prepared. The roof of the building collapsed with a roar,
creating an explosion that hurtled masses of burning moss high into
the air. Thousands of fiery brands burst from the factory and took
wing. The malevolent wind lofted the flaming sprites of destruction
and sent them flying like devilish burning doves. The flaming clumps
of moss swirled relentlessly to the innocent east.
There the flying fire settled on shingle roofs of dwellings yards
away. In neighboring backyards, once-harmless debris became piles of
fire. Intowindows the airborne missiles flew. Curtains,
moments before dallying in the gentle breeze, became sheets of
flame.
Fire Chief Thomas Haney, among the first to arrive, sounded a
general alarm. From all directions the city firefighters came. Soon
all were on the scene.
Haney himself stood foremost against the heat and flame. Twice
that awful day he would be felled in combat. Now he directed streams
of water on the factory. Smoke and flames arose on three sides
around his force.
The chief divided his men and machines. One detachment went east,
ahead of the fire. Another was sent to the west, to guard buildings
and dwellings to the rear. Harrison wrote the chief himself "went to
the front at the post of danger and worked there with despair
already in his heart."
The parched pine-shanty suburb of Hansontown already was a
furnace. Roofs caved in. Bedding and every variety of household
goods rose bodily from their dwellings and added their burning
airborne fragments to the conflagration.
"The firemen stood under a roof of flames, and the [fire] swept
over them and beyond the reach of their engines," Harrison wrote.
Exhausted, the chief turned from his work, and stared in
disbelief at the horrific scene.
The entire city was going up in flames behind him.
It was 1 p.m., and the Great Jacksonville Fire had the whole
afternoon ahead of it.
