Chelsea History, part 3 of 6. Earlier: the Winnisimmet Ferry and Lewis Latimer.
At 10:44 on the morning of Sunday, April 12, 1908, a fire alarm came in from the western edge of Chelsea, near the Everett line. By midnight the heart of the city was gone.
How it started
Nobody ever proved the cause. Walter Merriam Pratt, who lived through it and published The Burning of Chelsea later that year, called the most plausible theory a burning pile of rags on a dump near the Boston Blacking Company, just off Summer Street, which set fire to the roof of the company’s building and its stock of oil. The city’s official account, in the first annual report of the state-appointed Board of Control, puts the start in the building at 241 to 243 Second Street, “on the windward side of the city.”
The wind decided everything. The Board of Control described “a very strong wind from the N. W.” Pratt called it “a forty-mile gale.” Fire Chief Spencer ordered a second alarm as soon as he arrived, and his crews had the first blaze in check when sparks carried ahead of it began new fires downwind. Chelsea’s horse-drawn department was soon overwhelmed. Engines came from Boston, which sent 13, and from Everett, Revere, Malden, Lynn, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Wakefield, Melrose and Brookline, with hose wagons from Saugus.
Broadway did not stop it
People expected the fire to stop at Broadway, Pratt wrote, because the buildings there were stone and brick. It did not. The local militia, the Fifth Company of the Coast Artillery Corps, reported to their armory, changed into uniform and left their civilian clothes, watches and money in their lockers. Within hours the new $100,000 armory burned with everything in it. Before the flames reached Chestnut Street the houses on Bellingham Hill were already burning, and the fire kept moving east.
City Hall burned, and the Public Library, the Frost Hospital, eight school buildings, churches and synagogues, and block after block of wooden homes. The Metropolitan Water Commission recorded 40 million gallons of water used in Chelsea that day, against a normal daily use of about 3 million.
The count
The figures vary by source. The Board of Control’s report, the city’s official record, gives these:
- 287 acres burned over
- 2,822 buildings destroyed, not counting public buildings
- 19 people killed, “being unable to get away from their burning homes”
- About 16,000 people burned out of their homes, half of whom found temporary shelter in the city while the rest had to leave
- $17 million in losses, against $8,826,879 in insurance
- 708 street shade trees lost
Pratt estimated the dead higher: 18 bodies recovered, and as many more, he believed, burned beyond recovery. More than 300 injured people were treated at the U.S. Naval Hospital, the U.S. Marine Hospital and the hospital of the Soldiers’ Home, the three institutions on the city’s hills that come up again in this series.
A city run by the state
The people of Massachusetts gave $360,000 for the relief of the fire’s victims. The Legislature went further. Chapter 559 of the Acts of 1908 legislated Chelsea’s elected government out of office, and on June 3 Acting Governor Eben S. Draper appointed a five-member Board of Control, William E. McClintock, Abraham C. Ratshesky, Mark Wilmarth, Alton E. Briggs and George H. Dunham, to run the city and rebuild it. The board worked out of two rooms in the high school until August. It was not the last time the state took over Chelsea’s government; the city went into receivership again in 1991.
Sixty-five years later, on October 14, 1973, another wind-driven fire burned 18 blocks of the city. Our story on the 1973 fire covers what stands there now. For photographs of 1908 and an eyewitness account written by a boy who watched from East Boston, see the site’s 1908 fire archive page and A Personal Account of the 1908 Fire.
The photograph above shows the gutted Knights of Columbus Block in Chelsea Square after the fire.
Next in the series: the Naval Hospital on Admirals Hill and the doctors who fought the 1918 influenza with the blood of survivors.