The Great Fire

Commemoration

            The intersection of Proctor, Boston, and Bridge Streets in Salem, Massachusetts is drab. A Dunkin Donuts spreads its pink and beige cheer; there’s an empty fenced-in lot with a coating of rubble, a three-family brick building, and a Walgreens, fringed with a parking lot. It’s an area no one has bothered to spruce up; the businesses will do their business regardless. Even the roads seem uncared for. The steady traffic on Boston Street must negotiate some jagged potholes.[2]

I stopped at this spot one day when I was out on a jog, drawn by a waist-high boulder in the corner of the Walgreens’ lot, sitting like an island in a pond of wood chips. On the side facing the intersection was a brown plaque. Bordered in gold with gold lettering, the plaque read:

At 1:37 PM on June 25, 1914, Box 48 was pulled for a fire in the Korn Leather Factory on this site at number 57 Boston Street in an area of town known as Blubber Hollow, followed at 1:41 PM by a general alarm.

This was the start of the Great Salem Fire.

This memorial is dedicated to those brave firefighters from Salem and surrounding communities who fought that conflagration.

The words were accompanied by an image of a fire alarm box, a bolded “48” on it.

I’d heard of the Great Salem Fire. It had destroyed a third of the city, burning 1,376 buildings and leaving over 15,000 homeless in a population of 48,000.[3] It had been national news, on the front pages of The Boston Globe and The New York Times for several days. The Saturday after the fire, it was estimated that up to half-a-million spectators traipsed through the smoky aftermath.[4] Photos record these visitors strolling down a decimated Lafayette Street, one of Salem’s most stately boulevards, the black remnants of trees and an occasional brick husk of a building rising from the ground behind them.

I looked around. There wasn’t anything that made me think of the fire, although just up the hill to the right, a place the fire hadn’t reached, I noticed a long, windowless building that seemed to have once been a factory.

            Behind the monument, a large sign for Walgreens sat on a sturdy brick rectangular base. Unlike the plaque, these words were visible from the street:

PEPSI 2LTR 4/$5
DORITOS 2/$4.29
GET YOUR FLU SHOT HERE TODAY

On the sidewalk nearby, a yellow fire hydrant, and near that, between Boston Street and the monument, a telephone pole, a gray utility box, and a skinny red fire alarm box as tall as a person. I wondered (it couldn’t be!) if the box was the same one that was pulled during the fire. It was so old and beat up, the paint faded and peeling. If I pulled the alarm’s white handle, would anything happen?

Despite the fire’s thorough destruction, it seems a footnote in this city saturated with history. Salem was the first capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the home of the country’s first millionaire. It was a great shipping capital in the New World, and the grand mansions of the ship owners still line stately Chestnut Street, though some have been divided into condos. Nathaniel Hawthorne is its reluctant native son. His House of Seven Gables is an historical attraction that looks out into the Atlantic, just across the street from Ye Olde Pepper Companie, the nation’s oldest candy store. And then there are the Witch Trials.

Amidst all this, the fire is an afterthought, something that some people know about, but which has not ensconced itself in Salem’s museum of memory.

I turned to the plaque and ran my fingers over the raised lettering. How do you commemorate a disaster? The words felt dull to me. A fact about when the fire started, and then a bland one-sentence acknowledgment of the firefighters. Of course they are “brave.”

It seemed obvious that this plaque was written well after the fact, after the smoke had not just cleared, but had been forgotten. If it wasn’t for the striking name, “Blubber Hollow,” which refers to the nineteenth-century practice of using whale blubber to tan leather, the memorial would be as dull as the rest of the intersection, something you pass because you must. It turns out that, yes, the plaque was put up in 1964, to mark the 50^th anniversary of the fire.[5]

I imagine the dedication: a couple city officials and some corralled staff members, a local historian, a few firefighters required to attend, all standing awkwardly at the intersection for 15 minutes. Can we go home now?

The words are a challenge, almost a taunt from those who wrote them, who set the boulder here: We, who commemorated this, had no idea what to say. What have you got?

*

Despite its impact at the time, the fire didn’t merit a chapter in Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory,an anthology of essays on the city. The book’s editors write that “Commemoration privileges some events over others, even when those others have touched a greater number of lives more profoundly…even dramatic local occurrences can lack the cachet of an enshrining event: in local catastrophes, lives may be lost, but the story of their death yields no moral.”[6]

For me, too, the fire meant little to the Salem I knew. My ancestor, Mary Towne Eastey, was killed for being a witch. Another, Thomas Perkins, sat on the jury that found her guilty. The legacy of the Witch Trials is inescapable. My other connection to Salem has been through teaching at the local university, Salem State, a career that has made me aware of the gulf of class in education. My students often work outside of school as much as I do at school. My wife and I raised our two sons here and live a few blocks from downtown; I spent a decade coaching them in Salem’s Little Leagues, where I encountered a cross-section of the city’s boys. Fire? What fire?

The fire did make a brief appearance in a long sequence of poems that I wrote about Salem, “Montage of Brick and Water,” but perhaps it’s in those poems more than I realized. The city seems filled with brick, and some of that brick, which the poems treat as a sign of age, was probably a sign of the rebuilding. Brick fills the downtown commercial district, an area that didn’t go up in flames. And—I’ve been told—brick lies between the inner and outer walls of my house, built in 1916, to help limit destruction in the case of another fire.[7] Though I’ve never seen that brick, I like knowing (or believing) that it’s there. I credit it for keeping things temperate; cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter. It makes our lives more livable.

We know the basement of my house, at 48 Winthrop Street, has the old fieldstone foundation from the previous house. In heavy rains or snows, water seeps in, sometimes several inches. When it floods like this, my wife puts on her boots and putters with the pump, while I scurry about in the rain, yank the hose through the basement window, and pull it to the gutter. We’ve become accustomed to this. “If you live in Salem, you’re going to get water in your basement,” a lifelong resident told us. Perhaps those floods are the past, reappearing every so often. Perhaps they’ve come to put out a fire.

When I dig in my puny yard, trying to level the topsoil or to add a plant, the earth always yields something that says fire: shards of pottery, dulled pieces of glass, or blackened soil that seem the remains of some long-ago wooden house. Once, I found a rusted pair of scissors, another time an old spoon.

My backyard has grass and some flowers now, but for most of my first two decades in Salem, it was a small, enclosed slab of packed dirt. My boys grew up playing in it, pitching and batting foam balls for hours, running the few feet from one base to another. I spent a lot of time out there, too. We didn’t think about what was pushing up from the ground, the bits of the past. The flitting ball of the present held our attention, drew us forward into our joys, our lives.

Now, I look out my back window, beyond my own yard, at my neighbors’ roofs and think about fragility and time and what lies beneath us, how Broad Street Cemetery, just up the block, stopped some destruction, the fire unable to leap the grass and stones. That night, as the flames were brought under control, those made homeless slept in the cemetery, and, reports say, a child was born there.[8]

Conflagration[9]

In the shadow of Gallows Hill, at the foot of Proctor’s Ledge, where the accused were hanged in 1692, the Korn Leather Factory blew, and the fire began.

It shot up the south side of Boston Street, wiping out a few neighborhoods directly to the south, where Splaine Little League field is, where Hawthorne Plaza is with its CVS and auto parts store. The firefighters dynamited ten houses on Boston Street to slow the blaze, but it only sped the destruction, the rubble catching fire. Though the fire did cross Boston Street in places, the wind, or something, kept it from traveling north until after it crossed Essex Street. 

On the corner of Essex and Boston was a fire station, and some people brought belongings there for safekeeping when they heard the alarm. It did no good. The station was burned completely as the fire leapt Essex and spread to the northeast.

Just up the block from the station, where Essex Street turns into Highland Ave., the fire destroyed the Highland Ave. Bridge and all the phone cables underneath, knocking out phone service to a third of the city. Had the fire traveled down Essex Street toward downtown, it would have destroyed the city’s business district, and it would have likely swallowed the house on 292 Essex, a house of Alexander Graham Bell, who had first displayed his telephone in the Salem Lyceum back in 1877: “Mr. Watson, will you speak to the audience?”

At the Highland Ave. bridge, the fire couldn’t get up the hill to the high school—now Collins Middle School—and so it rushed down Jackson Ave. and went northeast. It spared Chestnut Street, where Salem’s wealthiest lived in huge houses that, in previous centuries, had belonged to Salem’s ship captains and merchants back when Salem was an international trading hub. In his book, The Salem Fire, firefighter Arthur Jones tells a story of how two homeowners used tea kettles and pans to tamp down a roof fire that would likely have led to Chestnut Street burning,[10] but it also seems like firefighters made a stand around this area, protecting the homes of the wealthy. The fire veered more east than north wiping out most of Phelps Street and Hathorne and Winthrop, the street where I live now.

Once the fire had shot through my neighborhood, it hopped across Canal Street, skirted the train station, and expanded south, wiping out several neighborhoods between Canal and Lafayette. Then it whooshed in a fiery wave through The Point neighborhood, home to the French-Canadian factory workers, until it reached the water. The poor would not be spared. The fire incinerated the whole of The Point, block after block of wooden tenement houses converted to ash. The community’s majestic St. Joseph’s French Catholic Church, which had just been completed in 1912, was gutted.

Despite the destruction, there were only three casualties. One, a Civil War veteran named Withey, lived just across the street from where our house is now, on the corner of Winthrop and Prescott.[11] As the fire leapt across the rooftops and the sirens blew out the city’s eardrums, the Marshall told the old veteran to leave his house, to leave the heavy chest of remembrances—medals, folded uniforms—and hurry to the safety of the grassy cemetery. What would you save? Withey said no. The door closed, the lock clicked, and the Marshall stood on the porch, fingered his gun, then walked to the next house.

Out my window, almost directly across the street, I see the small house, built on the site of Withey’s last stand. It’s sky blue with white trim.

*

Seeing his car on fire, a man leapt into it and drove it into the ocean, where it burned down to the waterline.[12]

Firemen sat in puddles from their spray, recovering from the intense heat.[13]

Among the 60 injured were some who jumped from the second floor of the Korn Factory, and a fire captain who was “hit in the face by flying nozzles.”[14]

Militia clearing neighborhoods in the path of the fire found three babies abandoned in houses.[15]

Three days after the fire, sidewalks in the burned area were still too hot to walk on.[16]

*

Handing out flyers for the Salem Arts Festival one summer, I talk with a cop who is directing traffic. Next to us is one of the hundreds of fire alarm boxes, like the one on the corner where the fire started. It’s plastered with bumper stickers for local bands. “Do these things still work?” I ask. “Yeah, they do,” he tells me, but no one ever uses them.

They worked in 1914, sending out the news quickly. For what must have been chaos, it all seemed so organized. Even though there were moments of confusion among the firefighters, and the water pressure prevented them from adequately holding the fire off in many places, and the dynamiting strategy didn’t work, they reacted quickly and with purpose. Firefighters from the neighboring town of Peabody were on the scene within 20 minutes, and several other towns sent help swiftly. Alarms rang, and people managed to get out of their houses, though they didn’t have time and help to remove many valuable belongings. Such efficiency seems like it would be hard to duplicate today, even in this era of cell phones and instant news. How many now would just shrug and say, I’ll wait and see what happens.

At 2:00 p.m., about 23 minutes after the fire began, the Mayor declared martial law. The militia swooped in before the fire was put out, and there was almost no looting, at least no documented looting. Their orders: “Shoot to kill.”

The greatest loss of life came later that evening. A few blocks from Blubber Hollow, in another leather factory, another container of celluloid exploded, and a fire raged that took out two blocks, including some stables. Thirteen horses were killed. That fire would have been known as a major fire in Salem history, had it not been for what had happened earlier that day, and it would have been much more disastrous had the fire crews from around the North Shore not been in the city, battling the original blaze.[17]

In the recollections of the fire, this smaller fire is an afterthought, and the horses get a sentence. It hurts to imagine their terror, the frenzy inside the stables, kicking at their gates, braying into the smoky night. At some point they must have known, as people know, that they were doomed.

*

In a photo taken from the height of the high school—now Collins Middle School—one can see the totality of the destruction: the roads laid out like maps, with little in between them except ash.[18] The black and white photo is mostly white, indicating the grey ash, but there are chimneys, rising out of the white like so many fingers, or blades of grass. For blocks, only chimneys and char. It looks somewhat like an athletic field, a setting for some alien game. Of course, it looks like a war-ravaged city, too.

I think of the difference between wood and brick.

Photos are the primary remembrance of the fire; they make it most real. In the Salem State University Archives are hundreds of photos of the fire and its aftermath. A handful of books exist about the fire, but the fire has been preserved mostly in images. The recent book, The Great Salem Fire of 1914: Images From the Phillips Library Collection,is largely photos. They are breathtaking, and they document the thoroughness of the devastation, particularly when paired with photos of Salem before the fire. Pre-fire, Lafayette Street’s stately elms and broad thoroughfare reflect Salem’s past wealth. Post-fire, the street is thronged with tourists walking or driving their boxy cars through a landscape similar to Dresden or Hiroshima.

And yet, the photos only touch so much. Many of them were created for commercial appeal. Most of the memorable images of the fire were made into postcards, which were mailed across the country as souvenirs. They emphasized the drama of disaster. The canny didn’t hesitate to make money on misfortune.

An ad in The Boston Globe on June 27, two days after the fire:

GREAT SALEM FIRE
POSTCARDS and prints for framing now ready; big money for hustlers. Agents wanted. Samples on receipt of 15c.
TICHNOR BROS. Inc, 151 Causeway St., Boston

I looked at two photos that open The Great Salem Fire. One is of children looking expectantly as a circus comes to town two days before the fire, peering from behind a rope down the street at the unseen parade. The second is of a group of children made homeless by the fire, getting food at a refugee camp. At first, I thought that the more haggard children in the second photo seemed more like children of Salem today, and perhaps that’s true, but really, in both photos the children seemed fundamentally different, as if from an alien culture. In the first photo, they are all dressed up, their faces full and round. They look like munchkins. Frankly, they are a bit frightening. In the other photo the faces are more gaunt and less clean, smudged with dirt, and they stare directly at the camera. They look like children of the Dust Bowl. 

In another image, a postcard, are five men, three seated, four hatted, in front of a black gate rimming a cemetery. The writing in white letters across the bottom says: Our Cook House, Salem Fire June 25, 1914. In front of the men, a stack of firewood, a big drum, several large rectangular containers. Most likely, this was a place where food was prepared as part of the relief effort.

I know that black gate. It’s at the end of my block, the cemetery next to the senior center with the ancient, broken headstones, the one where the baby was born.[19]

Community

Some months after the fire, Montanye Perry, a fiction writer and past director of a night school for immigrants, wrote a series of articles on the relief efforts for the main Salem newspaper, The Salem Evening News. These were collected in a thin book, The Salem Fire Relief. Her stated purpose, laid out on the opening page, was to “furnish an inquiring public” with details about the relief effort. There had been complaints. Some were that a few “imposters” collected relief that they were not entitled to, and some were that the relief efforts were inefficient, caught up in red tape and squabbling.

While the articles freely admitted to such problems, they argued, via moralistic episodes with unidentified characters (“the Doctor,” “Business Man,” and “Wealthy Citizen”) that the distribution was fair, the red tape necessary, and the fraud infrequent. The articles pointed out that human nature was such that people would want what others had, and even noted that a freeloader’s desire to game the system wasn’t so different than a businessman’s desire to corner a market. The articles’ spirit is triumphant, noting informal help, such as rich citizens lending cars and time for those made homeless, relief workers and doctors volunteering for weeks, and the anonymous person who pinned ten dollars to the swaddling of a refugee baby. They credited the militia, which established and kept order in the camps the first two weeks after the fire.

Still, throughout the book, there is an acknowledgment that people were disgruntled about the recovery. The book closes on an odd note. “Let those whose faith in humanity has been shaken by the events of these trying weeks take heart.” The “calamity” may have “brought to light some glaring defects in human nature,” but it also “revealed glorious heights of generosity and powers of self-sacrifice.” And, in her final paragraph, Perry says that the story may seem to “present a mass of crude, sordid ugliness,” but, taking the long view, the “picture is far from being a discouraging commentary on the human race in its entirety.”[20]

*

These undercurrents of class conflict and prejudice come to light when tracing the reasons for the fire’s extensive damage. Franklin Wentworth, a Salem councilman in the years before the fire, wrote that Salem “assumed no responsibility to protect the lives and livelihood of her common people, and her property-owning class was content to run its daily risk because it knew it could saddle its fire losses upon the country.”[21]

In 1910, Wentworth, responding to a report from the National Board of Fire Underwriters, tried to pass a roof policy for Salem, which would have required noncombustible roofs on all structures. The city council rejected it, viewing it as a scam of the insurance industry. Likewise, it was recommended that high-pressure pumps be purchased, but the city didn’t want to invest the 150,000 dollars that it would have required. In a rare exhibition of personality, the firefighter Arthur Jones writes in his account that “Someone good at figures could figure out how long it took to burn $150,000.00 on June 25^th.”[22] Recalling the fire, Orille L’Heureux told how his father tried to wet down the house, but that there was no water pressure, as if the hose was simply peeing.[23]

The Korn Leather Factory was also at fault. In cutting corners, it put workers at risk (and, it turns out, the whole city). According to a state official, “if the factory had been equipped with a sprinkler system . . . there was nothing in this building which water would not have extinguished.”[24] After the fire, factory owner Max Korn had to rebuild in Peabody, the next town over, because of threats in Salem.[25]

*

Stories of disasters often include babies. A living baby represents survival of the species, and an investment by humans in the future—it’s worth it to bring new life into the world. That baby born at the Broad Street Cemetery? It shows endurance, continuation. Robert Withey, the Civil War vet down the street, has his life extinguished in the fire; a new soul appears that night on the same block among the long dead.

Jones’ book describes the babies born at the maternity hospital in the week after the fire: “three French, one Italian, and one American.”[26] Distinctions were made.

Those babies rumored abandoned in the tenements? In the media, their story might reinforce prejudices against the poor—what kind of people abandon infants? But is there also a hint at a desperation in some immigrants’ lives, perhaps the unspoken wishes of a few overwhelmed women. Maybe we want to start over, or at least have a break. One baby was found with a simple note in Forest River Park: “Tecla. Gone to Brockton.”[27]

What to make of Selma Florence Barstol, who took her parents in when fire took their home, even though she was about to give birth? Shortly after her baby was born, she died, and The Salem Evening News blamed “the excitement of the fire and misfortune of her parents” for her death.[28] The baby survives, but the fire extracted its price—thus kindness is rewarded.

And then there was the French-speaking woman who went to the maternity hospital, distraught. Despite the language barrier, it was finally understood that she had been separated from her eight-month-old baby. He was found the next day at the North Shore Children’s Hospital, where he had been given the name “Shackles.”[29]

*

It took me a month of poking through books, returning again and again to the map, blowing up the map online, walking, jogging, and biking, simply to get a handle on the fire’s borders. I’d traverse the city, testing: “this block burned, this one didn’t.” A map makes things look so clear and tidy, but when you live in a place, and walk its streets, the forest can disappear in the trees.

One February day, I biked through The Point neighborhood, which runs about a half mile from Lafayette Street to the water. The city was drying out from a cold rain, sunny and 40 degrees, and I was thankful for the biking gloves I’d gotten for Christmas. At the time of the fire, The Point had been home to French Canadian laborers. It’s now home to Salem’s more recent immigrants from the Dominican.

After the fire, the shell of the grand St. Joseph’s French Catholic Church, built out of brick and stone, seemed like the only raised structure in The Point. Between the two remaining towers, a 12-foot statue of a hirsute St. Joseph rose over what had been the entrance, some 100 feet above ground. For the next thirty years, the statue hovered in the neighborhood sky. It was taken down and interred on the site in 1944 in a public ceremony. Families photographed their children beside it before it was lowered into the earth.[30]

The French-Canadian community, decimated by the fire, struggled to raise funds to build a new church. Governor Walsh, speaking to a huge crowd of refugees at Forest River Park on June 28^th, promised funds for “an even more beautiful edifice.”[31] This didn’t come to pass. For many years the parish made do, renovating the basement of the destroyed church to hold masses, building a rectory and school on the site, until, finally, a new church was completed in 1954. That church was shut down in 2004, during the church closings after the abuse scandal, and, in 2013, it was razed to make way for new housing and businesses. St. Joseph, who had become little more than a rumor, was unearthed during that construction, and, in a small private ceremony, was reinterred beneath Jimmy John’s Pizza and the Lafayette Apartments, while, in the surrounding neighborhood where French had been spoken and sung, Spanish filled the air.

In 2017, Salem held a ballot referendum on whether to declare itself a sanctuary city. The sound and fury of the opposition signified something—discomfort with the browning of Salem, the fact that in The Point, a few square blocks of the city, more Spanish was heard than English, or that a woman buying groceries in Market Basket might not understand the cashier (or vice versa) and slow the line. It was a time when the Trump administration was threatening various measures on cities that passed such resolutions, including withholding federal funds. Reports were coming out about children being separated from their parents when they requested asylum at the border. Now, in 2024, Trump’s rhetoric has only gotten harsher as he ramps up his campaign, and, despite the scrubbing of a lot of politics from Facebook, my feed gets the occasional ugly meme about the need for a wall, or how “our” country isn’t “ours” anymore.

*

I biked down Congress, past Celia’s Spanish Cuisine, looked both ways off the wide street down narrow ones, which seemed even narrower because of the crowded three and four-deckers that were separated by spaces not more than an arm’s length, and sometimes by no space at all. There were no front yards or back yards, not even a scrim of dirt or grass between sidewalk and street. The neighborhood appeared similar to what it looked like at the time of the fire: crowded, treeless, except now the buildings were made of brick, not wood. Now, though, there is the occasional mural on the side of a brick building, a splash of vibrant color.

In a corner of The Point, at the baseball field at Palmer Cove, I turned left past Harbor Sweets, a candy shop. The most expensive chocolate in America, the founder proudly proclaimed.[32] Though locals shop there, its thriving mail order business made it successful. It felt odd, yet oddly right, here among the tenements; both seemed from another century.

Then, I went into Shetland Office Park on the waterfront, an area that, before and after the fire, had housed the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Factory. The factory made cotton sheets, and it was a major employer of the French-Canadian immigrants. The factory—all Salem’s factories—are long gone, though these buildings, built after the fire, remain. I passed the Bureau of Deeds and warehouses for self-storage, then the Salem Academy Charter School, and the Department of Transitional Assistance.

I looped back up Congress, then turned down some of the narrow streets and passed a woman hurrying out of a car and into a house, wearing a leopard skin nightgown. A few houses down, a sketchy man loitered on the sidewalk, scoping things out. Then past the house where my son’s friend lived, the one he used to jam with in the Music Department’s practice rooms at Salem State.

What exactly was I looking for? Traces of a 100-year-old fire? Or was it something simpler, something in the present that could make meaning of the past? I think I was searching for community.

Eventually, I got beyond the reach of the fire, moving toward my stomping grounds: Forest River Park and Salem State University. I know both well. They are Salem to me, as much as any place, and both survived the flames. My work life revolves around teaching at the University, and I spent a decade of summers on the Little League field at Forest River, shouting instructions to children, my own and others: “Cover the bag,” “Head on the ball.” Evenings were communal gatherings, the field’s lights bleeding into the night of the surrounding neighborhood. Spanish and English in the aluminum bleachers and in the dugouts. Children lining up at the snack bar.

I may know Salem best through its baseball fields. It is where I’m closest to its ground, where it’s flat, or flattened, with no buildings, like the city after the fire. I can even imagine the cooled ash like the Forest River infield dirt after a long dry spell, powdery and dusty, kicked up into puffy clouds by a bored eight-year-old second baseman.

*

The largest and longest standing refugee camp was established at Forest River.[33] It housed over 1500 refugees, who lived in rows and rows of white tents. The 400 tents had wooden floors, which made life a bit more bearable when the rains came. Though the tents were identical, the refugees soon put their names or other markers in front of their lodgings to distinguish them, and simply to help them find their way back to their temporary homes.

The camp was established by the militia, and it functioned like a small village. It had mess halls, an infirmary, a post office, and church services. Mass, in French, was held at the end of every day. At first, a military bugle called the refugees to mass. Later, the pastors used a large bell to gather their parishioners.

The Red Cross had both paid and unpaid nurses, and doctors from the area donated their time. Volunteers distributed food and clothing. Children’s clothing was especially needed. The volunteers came from across the country, many with experience in recovery after disasters. A long list of items provided to a “Mrs. Bik” from the Salem Relief Committee includes a stove, a dining table and chairs, an icebox, a sewing machine, four pillows, a double bed and bedding, other various furniture, including a crib, 50 dollars in cash, 62 dollars for food, 12 dollars for rent, and “clothing for woman and three children.” At the end of the account is the sentence, “The law provides that Mothers’ Aid shall be adequate!” complete with exclamation point.[34]

A local band played concerts at Forest River, the refugees singing along to “patriotic airs,” whether it was “La Marseillaise,” “The Maple Leaf Forever,” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.”[35] While there were strong distinctions and prejudices of class and culture (think of those un-American babies), the community seemed to accept its diversity, as heard in the sermons of the time. Dewitt Clark, of the Tabernacle Congregational Church, noted how many sufferers “were not of the American type.” “In seeking to do acts of kindness and goodness,” Clark noted, “lines had been obliterated and all were one people.” And Henry Bolinger, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, praised the city’s “great spirit of kindness and sympathy…out of it will come something better, something more lasting.”[36]

*

I circled Forest River, stopping to check out a wreath with a red bow and gold bells that had been left on one of the benches facing Salem Harbor. I passed a man jogging with his dog, a woman walking hers, and when I biked up to the playground, found a mother and two young girls.

When my boys were little, I’d take them to this tree-dotted high ground beyond the parking area, the baseball field out of view. Aidan, my oldest, loved to play on the wooden cars. He’d scoot into the driver’s seat and tell me to get in beside him. I would, though I’d have to sit on the divider between the front seat and the back, and we would go “shopping.” When we would get to the “store,” he’d climb out and gather rocks and sticks, pretending they were all sorts of foods. He’d put them in the back of the car, and off we’d go, moving only through time.

When the boys were a bit older, we’d take them to the huge wading pool in the opposite corner of the park from the ballfield. There was a large black witch painted on the bottom, the Salem High mascot. On hot summer days, the pool filled with Salem’s children, especially those from The Point, those who couldn’t afford the Y. It was a gathering place for community. The children—pink, cream, brown and black—clambered over each other, shouting and laughing, despite the occasional fight or injury. The parents set up towels in the shade, drifting into the pool now and then to soak in the cool.

*

Closer to home—my home—is Bertram Field, which was the site of the other main refugee camp. The French Canadians burned out of The Point went the mile south to Forest River; the other refugees—Polish, Greeks, Eastern European Jews—ended up at Bertram. The Jews insisted on their own area and a kosher cook.[37]

Bertram Field sits on the raised hill beside what was then the high school, now Collins Middle School. My two sons used to walk the six blocks to Collins, the reverse route of the fire. Then they went to Salem High, in a time when middle-class white families fled the public schools, a time when, although Salem is over three-quarters white, Salem’s schools shifted from being majority white to Latino.[38]

In a photo of Bertram after the fire, the football field’s bleachers rise behind the line of tents. From Bertram’s hill, you could look down across the ruins, the lonely smokestacks in the rubble, those fingers reaching from the ground, accusing the sky.

Now, although the field is still there—it’s where the high school plays its football games—it’s fringed by woods. The middle schoolers, no doubt, sneak into these trees for their first tastes of pot or sex, the unregulated shade a first step into life’s wildness. And now, it has become increasingly a hangout for the unhoused, who have found their way up from Boston and planted a few tents out of view from the neighborhood’s backyards.

*

In the camps, those with power exercised it on those with less. Captain Blanchard took a reporter on a stroll through Forest River in early July, and when he found men who weren’t working, he’d interrogate them as to why, threatening them with removal from camp if they weren’t at work in the future.[39]

Assertions of power were justified as efforts to prevent sloth, and sometimes, for the sake of public health and cleanliness. At Forest River Park, Arthur Tremblay’s attempt to sell beer was shut down for being against “liquor laws.”[40] An account in The Salem Evening News describes officers ordering “some youngster” to pick up “rubbish.”[41] At Bertram Field’s camp, a child was taken from his parents, against their will, and brought to the contagious hospital when he had tonsillitis. In despair, or protest, the mother left— “she got past the guards at the gate and wandered out into the darkness, where for a time she was lost.”[42]

Commemoration

When the smoke hadn’t yet cleared, when the smell of it still lingered over the rebuilt railroad tracks, in the firefighters’ gear, in the frazzled minds of Salem’s citizens, the fire still had meaning. In 1915, on the one-year anniversary, a plaque was installed in Lafayette Park. The park itself was one of several created after the conflagration to prevent a fire from crossing the city so rapidly, so easily. Triangular, the park borders The Point. Park and plaque sit across the street from where St. Joseph’s Church burned to the ground.

IN COMMEMORATION
OF THE
ENTERPRISE AND RESOLUTE SPIRIT
WITH WHICH
SALEM AROSE FROM HER ASHES
LOOKED CALAMITY IN THE FACE
AND REBUILT HER WALLS,
ON THIS SPOT
IN THE PATHWAY OF THE GREAT FIRE OF
JUNE 25, 1914,
WHICH SWEPT FROM THE WEST
TO THE WATER’S EDGE
DESTROYING ABOUT ONE THIRD
OF THE CITY
AND RENDERING HOMELESS
MORE THAN ONE THIRD OF
HER PEOPLE
THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED
BY
J. ACKERMAN COLES, M.D., L.L.D.
1915

The city rededicated the plaque and gussied it up in 2014 to commemorate the 100^th anniversary, but I doubt that, other than for that ceremony, many city officials have set foot in that park. It seems a gathering place for folks who are down-and-out, drugs and shady deals. The creation of this public park back in 1915 was the only real controversial rebuilding project. The space had been taken by eminent domain. Protestors said that the money should have been spent on schools and public works, not commemoration.

The monument stands in the northwest corner of the park, facing down Washington Street where the fire crossed the tracks, where, today and most days, a man stands in front of a Domino’s Pizza in a red and blue Domino’s Pizza shirt, holding a huge poster board advertising the special of the day.

The man has stood there, it seems to me, since we moved to Salem over 25 years ago. Back then, he looked like a high schooler. Now, when I bike past him, I see his curly grey sideburns.[43]

*

From the perspective of 100 years, the recovery seems efficient and effective. Power was completely restored to the city by June 27^th, two days after the fire, a fact that astonishes when, today, a brutal nor’easter can knock out a neighborhood’s power for weeks.[44] The city was rebuilt in the next three years. The factories returned, although the Korn Leather Factory had to move to Peabody. The Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, which bordered The Point and the Atlantic, and was one of the last buildings to burn, was rebuilt completely by early 1916.[45]

The fire halted Salem’s growth, but it was the cheap labor in the south, two decades later, that spelled the end of Salem’s industries. After the fire, houses were rebuilt, generally with brick instead of wood. Parks were created with the idea that they might halt the rush of some future fire. New building regulations were established.

Bertram Field’s camp emptied out by the second week of July. By mid-August, less than six weeks after the fire, the Forest River Park camp had shut down too. They had housed thousands. Somehow, everyone found a hole to sleep in. And while there was some displacement, there was enough of a community, particularly among the French-Canadians, that most of them remained in the Salem area. The church may have been destroyed, and it wasn’t going to be rebuilt in all its glory, but the people survived. They mostly chose to stay, and they mostly were able to do so.

Today, the city’s roughly the same size that it was then, nearly 50,000 people; there’s tourism, not manufacturing. There are still some French Canadians, some Italians, Irish, Poles, African Americans. And now there are Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, a sprinkling of Vietnamese.

The tanning factories focused on shoes, specifically women’s leather shoes, the industry built up in the last decades of the 19^th century.[46] Today, they’re all gone. A friend tells me about working as a night watchman at the last factory in the early 1980s, after it had been shut down, guarding the abandoned machinery. It was just him and the rats. At the corner of Boston and Essex Street, just up the block from where the fire began, is a new store, Urban Styles, with shrink-wrapped leather sneakers, made in some Asian country. Even the ones on sale cost over $100.

*

Two schools that had burned, Saltonstall and Brown, were combined into one: Saltonstall. 

A new fire station was built on Loring Ave. The fire station on Essex was rebuilt.

The Society of Friends Church was rebuilt.

On Endicott Street, just up my block, they cleared an open space.

High Street Park, grimy little park of my children’s youth, was created behind the St. Mary’s Italian Catholic Church. The church, which, like St. Joseph’s, closed during the sex abuse scandal, is now a homeless shelter. The park’s still there.[47]

*

            In 2017, a year after Donald Trump’s election, Salem voted 6756 to 5030 to approve a ballot initiative affirming that Salem would be a sanctuary city, that its police officers and other city officials would not ask about immigration status or seek proof of citizenship from anyone needing service. Tanya Stepasiuk, who chaired the group that advocated for the passage of the ordinance, said, “We need to come together with our neighbors here. We’re looking forward to all of Salem coming together. We know people have different views, but we all know we love and care about this city.”[48]

Perhaps the reason the fire isn’t part of Salem’s standard lore is simply because the city recovered, and the scars, like many scars, are smoothed over by new skin. Perhaps the story of the fire is that the recovery went fairly well, that the refugees were sheltered and fed, and that, generally, they found new living conditions in less than two months. That, while the militia was bossy at times, and while those with more groused about those with less getting a little, things proceeded fairly smoothly. The French-Canadian community was big enough and intact enough that it didn’t scatter to the wind. Those who left Salem found housing in surrounding towns. I have descendants from those communities in my classes at Salem State today.

Of course, the monuments are almost invisible. What changed doesn’t tell us it changed. The fireproof roofs, the brick triple-deckers, Lafayette Park. The one building that would have best commemorated the fire would have been the rebuilt St. Joseph’s church, or at least the huge statue of St. Joseph that surveyed the neighborhood in the ghostly remnants of the church for some 30 years after the fire. But that church disappeared a century after the fire itself, and the interred statue of St. Joseph is deep under the new building erected on the site.

I biked to the front of that building, a squat apartment complex some four stories high, with a new small grocery on the first floor, The Daily Table, which offers discounted food to The Point neighborhood. In the brick wall near the apartment entrance is the concrete cornerstone with “2013” carved in it. Just above that, an old fire emergency box number 5122. It’s red and white color is a plastic seal—not paint—and it has been peeled off around the bottom.

I suspect it works.

*

As I was shoveling the inch of show that had fallen, finishing up the path to our backyard, I heard some wailing and swearing from the street in front of the house—someone talking to herself. “A crazy drunk,” I thought, and felt glad that there was a little distance between us. Not enough, though. A woman’s voice called out through the dark, “Excuse me, excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“Could you help me out? Could you do me a favor?” 

I walked toward the front. “Well, what is it?”

A woman stood in the street, shivering. She wore a thin coat and looked a bit off balance; it seemed clear that she’d been crying. She needed a ride to the hospital, she said. This had been the worst day of her life. It was her birthday, and her boyfriend had broken up with her, had walked away from her on the street, and when she asked him to slow down, he just kept going. She had shattered a bone in her leg some weeks ago and had taken the cast off because it had started to smell, but now she could hardly walk. And it was her birthday. She was 40.

            “Let me tell my wife,” I said. I opened the front door, and Eileen heard the story, too. Her voice instantly took on the tender tone she used when a child was hurt. I grabbed my keys and the woman and I got into our car.

            In the car, she kept thanking me. It turned out she didn’t want to go to the hospital after all. “I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m not going to the hospital. I’m going to the woods near the school. Next to the hospital I have a friend with a tent. Gonna sleep in a tent.”

            “You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” I asked. “That sounds cold.”

            I drove her the five blocks to the middle school, and she told me a lot about herself, all while thanking me extravagantly. “You’re a saint,” she kept saying. 

            She told her story again. She had gone to the shelter. She had gone to the police. Nobody would help. “You can probably tell that I had a few drinks,” she said. She was just in a bad spot now. “I’m not from around here. I’ve saved people’s lives. I’m a photographer.”

            “It feels good in here,” she said. “Feel my hand. Feel how cold.” I drove up the sloped lot and parked, left the engine running. I reached out and took her hand. It was cold. We shook. I looked more carefully at her. She had a nose ring, dark longish hair, and she wore a pair of oversized sweatpants.

She looked straight at me and said again, “Really, you’re a saint,” then opened the door and eased her leg out. She turned back to thank me one more time, then limped off to cross the basketball court, heading toward the small, wooded hill. I watched her go. I could hardly stand it, seeing her hobble off into the cold dark, barely able to walk. Was there even any shelter for her in those woods, or was that just a hopeful dream?

That hill had once held plenty of tents, shelters for those displaced by the fire. I watched her walk toward it, and I dreamed of rows of ghost tents still standing, and some kind citizens offering food and clothing, making sure she would get through the night.

---

[1]

[2] “The intersection of Proctor . . . jagged potholes,” Since the writing of this essay, Boston Street has been repaved and the area is busy with new construction.

[3] “burning 1376 buildings and leaving over 15,000 homeless,” GSF, quoting The Salem Evening News, June 25, 1915: 59. Other estimates have at least 18,000 homeless (DC).

[4] “The Saturday after the fire . . .,” GSF says 200-500 thousand estimated to have come in on the Saturday after the fire, citing The Salem Evening News, June 28, 1914: 74. Jones, in The Salem Fire, writes that “it is said there were one million people in Salem on the night of June 25^th,” though this most likely refers to relief workers as well as tourists. This seems almost certainly an exaggeration: 105.

[5] “It turns out that, yes, the plaque . . . was put up in 1964 . . .,” Email conversation with Salem historian, Donna Seger.

[6] “Commemoration privileges . . . yields no moral,” Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory (Boston, Northeastern UP. 2004), “Introduction”: 6.

[7] “brick lies between the inner and outer walls of my house,” A recent visit by an insulation company revealed this is probably not true.

[8]  “homeless slept in the cemetery . . . a child was born there,” SSU. 

[9] “Conflagration” section. The path of the fire which follows is documented in SF (35-44) and GSF (34-58).

[10] “Arthur Jones tells a story . . .,” SF: 99-100.

[11] “a Civil War veteran . . .,” SF mentions Withey dying in his house: 43. 

[12] “Seeing his car on fire,” SSU.

[13] “Firemen sat in puddles,” photo in GSF: 110.

[14] “Among the sixty injured . . . flying nozzles,” SF: 43.

[15] “Militia clearing neighborhoods . . . found three babies,” SF: 117.

[16] “Three days after the fire . . .,” GSF: 16

[17] “They worked in 1914…battling the original blaze,” These facts about the response to the fire are found in several sources, including SF and GSF.

[18] “In a photo . . .,” This photo and the others mentioned in this section, as well as the advertisement in the Boston Globe, can be found in SSU.

[19] “It’s at the end of my block . . . next to the senior center,” The senior center has been moved to a new location, right near where the fire started, just off Boston Street. The building remains.

[20] “Let those whose faith in humanity . . . human race in its entirety,” SFR: 76-77.

[21] “assumed no responsibility…,”GSF: 35.

[22] “Someone good at figures . . .,” SF: 21.

[23] “Recalling the fire . . .,” Orille L’Heureux’s memory is recorded in Elizabeth Blood and Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello’s video, Le Grand Feu: Franco-American Memories of the Fire.

[24] “if the factory had been equipped . . .,” SF: 36.

[25] “After the fire, Max Korn had to rebuild in Peabody,” GSF: 38.

[26] “Three French, one Italian, and one American,” SF: 116.

[27] “Tecla. Gone to Brockton,” SF: 117.

[28] “The Salem Evening News blamed the fire . . .,” The Salem Evening News, July 2, 2014: 11.

[29] “given the name ‘Shackles’,” SF: 111.

[30] “After the fire, the shell of the church . . .,” The material on St. Joseph’s church and statue is from The Salem Evening News’ articles “Workers find Statue of St. Joseph in Salem,” May 14, 2013 and “Heard Around Town: the Story behind the St. Joseph Statue,” May 17, 2013.

[31] “an even more beautiful edifice,” The Salem Evening News, 2 July 1914: 12; qtd. in DC.

[32] “the most expensive chocolate in America,” from a conversation with Harbor Sweets founder, Ben Strohecker. Strohecker, who passed away in 2016, kept a tag hanging from his car’s rear view mirror as a reminder: “DBASH.” Don’t be a shithead.

[33] “The largest and longest standing refugee camp . . .,” The following material on the Forest River Camp comes from a number of sources. The material at the beginning of the paragraph is from Great Salem Fire: 17. The material at the end of the paragraph, about the refugees personalizing their space and the rituals of the camp, were from DC, Chapter Three: “It Is Easy Enough to Establish Camps: Geographies of Community and Resistance in Burned Salem”: 78-104.

[34] “The Red Cross . . .,” This paragraph, including the list of items, is from GSF: 97-99.

[35] “A local band played concerts…,”DC: 81.

[36] “as heard in the sermons at the time . . .,” A summary of the Salem churches’ responses to the fire is found in DC, in Chapter Six, “The Sufferings of This Time Are Not Worthy to Be Compared with the Glory That Is to Come”: 165-75.

[37] “The Jews insisted on . . . a kosher cook,” DC: 95-96.

[38] “although Salem is over three-quarters white…majority white to latino,” Salem’s demographics: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/massachusetts/salem#demographics

Salem high school demographics: http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=02580505&orgtypecode=6.

[39] “Captain Blanchard . . .,” DC: 85-86.

[40] “Arthur Tremblay’s . . . against liquor laws,” DC: 98.

[41] “some youngster to pick up rubbish,” The Salem Evening News, 3 July 1914: 6.

[42] “she got past the guards . . .,” The Salem Evening News, 12 July 1914: 2.

[43] “When the smoke hadn’t yet cleared . . . I see his curly grey sideburns,” Since this essay’s composition, Lafayette Park has been spruced up by the city, and it doesn’t have the seedy feel it once did. The monument to the fire has been buffed clean and, curiously, moved from one corner of the park to a somewhat more central location. The man with the greying sideburns has not been seen recently.

[44] “Power was completely restored . . .,” GSF: 69.

[45] “Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company…rebuilt by 1916,” GSF: 174.

[46] “The tanning factories focused on shoes…,” GSF: 22.

[47] “Two schools that had burned…The park’s still there,” This list of changes to the Salem landscape is taken fromGSF: 153.

[48] “In 2017…care about this city,” The Salem Evening News, 7 November 2017.

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