“Unforgettable sights met Settlement’s rescue team” from the October 5, 1971 Door County Advocate
The Great Fire of 1871
Unforgettable sights met Settlement’s rescue team
By KETA STEEBS
About 10 miles south of Sturgeon Bay, right alongside Highway 57, a pleasant park welcomes wayfarers. Near it stands a neat, white tavern owned by a square shouldered, ruddy faced man with keen blue eyes and a mischievous grin. His name is Al Moore, son and grandson of the first two men to reach Williamsonville after the fire. If Al looks to the west he faces the site of a shingle mill, if he looks southwest he faces the well in which five lives were saved, and if he looks north, directly out of his living room window, he can see the exact location where Garrette and John Moore found the charred body of a man seated behind the remains of two mules. Al lives next door to “Tornado Park.”
THE ORIGINAL WELL, located at this site in 1871, proved safe haven for five of seven persons who sought refuge during the fire. A man called Tom Cryin and a “little French girl” perished. Visitors to Tornado Park and traveling motorists can see this monument to a past tragedy alongside highway 57. —Advocate
THE AFTERMATH
“My dad was 19 years old in October of ’71 and to the end of his days he never forgot the sights he saw at Williamsonville,” says Al, with a faraway look in his eye.
“My grandfather, John Moore, must have been in his early forties. He had by now lived in Brussels for 13 years, coming as he did from County Cork in 1858 with his two brothers. There were more Irishmen here than Belgians back in the 1850’s and if you doubt it, look at the old tax rolls with all the Kirbys, Callahans and Maloneys.”
“Well, anyway, this had been one dry year. Dad said he and my grandfather worried all that summer about what would happen in case of fire but there wasn’t much anybody could do about it. That Sunday night they knew a terrible forest fire raged north of them and any minute now could take their place but somehow or other the Brussels hill provided enough of a barrier to spare them. It didn’t spare them from the smoke and they spent a mighty uncomfortable night but the main thing was they were all alive.”
“The next morning my grandfather hitched his horses to a cart and, grabbing an axe, told dad to get hold of a saw. They knew the only way to get to Williamsonville was to hack their way through the central road and it took them most of that day and the next. Garrette, my dad, went ahead cutting fallen logs out of the path and John led the horse. It wasn’t until Tuesday afternoon that they got to Williamsonville.”
“I don’t know just what time they finally arrived at what was left of the settlement but I do know that right out there where my driveway curves was the body of a man, who had evidently been hauling barrels of water in a cart. He sat upright, burned to a crisp with the burned mules lying there in front of him. All that was left, besides the remains, was a bit of line still clasped in his hand.”
Al says his father and grandfather soon found the potato patch where the 35 bodies (previously counted by Tom Williamson) were piled in a circle — women and children in the center — men on the outside ring. Other bodies (Al says 83 in all but that figure differs from other accounts) were found in the woods and on the outskirts of the once thriving, now doomed settlement.
AL MOORE
The Brussels hill, which safeguarded the Moore family, didn’t help 180 other homeowners living in the “south part of the Belgian settlement at Brussels.” The Oct. 19 Advocate, in which the front page was relinquished for the first time to local news, carried a story datelined Green Bay, Oct. 11, 4:15 p.m., saying, “But five houses were all that was left of the large and flourishing settlement of Brussels and this morning 200 people breakfasted on four loaves of bread.”
By now the report of Williamsonville’s losses were fully confirmed. Fifty-five lives were lost and 10 others badly burned. Only three persons remained uninjured, one of whom was in Green Bay giving an eyewitness account of the catastrophe.
Sturgeon Bay and Little Sturgeon were lucky. Editor Harris wrote “both places were only saved by great labor” — not taking into account “great labor” hadn’t saved Peshtigo, Williamsonville, or other settlements unfortunate enough to lie directly in the tornado’s path or to be hit by a devastating “fireball.”
Sturgeon Bay’s lone fire engine (now a museum piece) was hauled to the shore ready to do battle with all four barrels of water. It came equipped with 200 feet of small hose capable of squirting a one-inch stream of water the height of a one and a half story building, a feat which caused Deacon George Pinney to remark “it was about as effective as a syringe or squirt gun.” Deacon Pinney never did think much of that homemade fire truck (whose record of failing to save a burning building remains unbroken to this day) and it is fortunate it wasn’t needed the night of Oct. 8. Chances are, if fire had struck, the Door county museum would be short one historic relic.
Stories of individual survivors filled subsequent editions of the Advocate and it was learned, for the first time, how Peter Berenson’s prayers were answered. Dubbed “Praying Peter” for the rest of his life, Berenson had received explicit directions from the Lord telling him what to do. Two days Peter had prayed, and for two days a divine voice told him to wet down his house, lead the cows to the stable and put the family’s clothes all in one bag and keep them in the house. He and his family emerged unharmed with their possessions intact.
Then there was a young Irishwoman called Plucky Kate who lived in the settlement south of the Big Sturgeon. After fighting fires with her husband all that Sunday afternoon she spotted the advancing tornado and, grabbing her child, carried the baby through a long stretch of burning and falling timber. Upon reaching a flaming log fence “breast high,” daring Kate pinned her skirts to the highest and, getting a good start, cleared the fence at a single bound with the baby clinging to her shoulders. Her husband, seeing her safe on the other side, exclaimed, “Why, Kate, you jump fences so well, I am afraid you’ll be breachy (flighty) after this.”
Kate, later that day suckled her own and two of her neighbor’s children who were famishing of thirst.
A few miles south of Williamsonville lived 15 Belgians described as being “among the poorest of the poor.” They arrived in 1868 and three years later each family had acquired a team, cheap farm utensils and five or ten acres of cleared land upon which a modest log cabin had been built. Alarmed by the menacing swamp fires of the past few weeks, these frugal newcomers had dug holes in the ground to bury the family’s goods in case of emergency. When Sunday’s tornado broke, they hastily buried their bedding, clothing and hams of bacon. Half an hour later every family but one was either burned or smothered to death. The story’s headline was “Saved Their Bacon.”
Editor J. Harris, for once not out of town on canal business, traveled to Menekaune (now part of Menominee, Mich.) the day after the fire and brought back reports of what had happened “on the other side.” By now, 470 bodies had been found in Peshtigo, a once thriving lumber town of 1,700 persons, and survivors were still dragging the river for more. It was predicted the number of victims “will not fall short of 500.” Harris had personally met five members of one family rescued from Birch Creek (a German settlement of about 100 persons located north of Menominee) and said the sight “presented a spectacle sickening to behold.” Twenty-two persons had died in Birch Creek that night and that number was faithfully added to the growing death toll.
So moved was Harris by what he had seen he immediately penned a letter to his friend the Honorable H. Ludington, mayor of Milwaukee, asking that clothing, food, aid of any kind be immediately sent to the afflicted areas.
“No pen can describe or exaggerate the horrors existing on both sides of the bay,” wrote Harris. “No less than 3,000 men, women and children have been left entirely destitute.”
Relief was on its way. And, some of it, like the top hat and swallow tailed coat sent to one homeless farmer, would take mighty strange forms.
(To be continued)
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
[Two phrases of filler, ten words long and four words long and lacking content, are censored because they might be perceived wrongly. The original and uncensored version is available from the newspaper archive.]
Articles by Keta Steebs
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/keta-steebs
Articles describing the 1871 fire
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/the-1871-fire