| Fire and Ice in Downtown Portsmouth |
SEACOAST DISASTERS
The holiday was hell in 1802, 1806 and 1813. Three devastating fires raged through the center of Portsmouth during December. Only by telling these stories again to generations can we keep our collective memory alive.
Three Times Downtown Portsmouth Burned
As the flames roared up State Street, a young Portsmouth girl tip-toed precariously on the seat of a rickety wooden chair. She had placed the chair inside a back closet of her home that was now in the path of the oncoming blaze. Holding the heavy basket with one hand, she stretched her free hand toward the topmost shelf to retrieve the final piece of the family’s ancient china tea set. As she leaned forward to place the item in the basket, the bright blade of an ax crashed through the wall splitting the air where her head had been a moment before.
That story comes from John H. Bowles whose "Aunty" was the girl in the closet during the Great Fire of 1813. That closet apparently projected into an outbuilding that citizen firefighters chopped down in order to get to a source of water. After one harrowing escape, Bowles aunt later joined her brother as he raced up to the attic to rescue a trunk filled with relics, including their grandmother’s brocade dresses.
"When we reached the garret, the room was in flames," Bowles aunt recalled 30 years later, "and the heat was so great that we could scarcely breathe."
But her brother plunged foolishly ahead, dragging the heavy trunk by one handle into the stairway. Then suddenly a burned patch of roof boards fell through the rafters, spewing burning embers across the floor. The December wind ripped through the hole "with the force of a tornado". Undaunted, the children saved the family heirloom, but within an hour their home was "one bright flame from the foundation to the ridgepole."
MORE ON Portsmouth Fire societies
See the blazing Yule
If cities have memories, then Portsmouth must grow nervous each December. The three largest fires in city history all occurred downtown on Christmas week in 1802, 1806 and 1813.
On Sunday December 26, 1802 at 4 am the face of the city was suddenly disfigured by the first of three devastating holiday fires. It began in the banking block of Market Square and obliterated the buildings along Daniel Street, but left the wooden North Church and the Old State House standing.
The second downtown fire struck on Christmas Eve morning. On Wednesday December 24, 1806, fire spread in from the Bow Street area and up Market Street to the barely recovered square, consuming the historic St. John’s church by the river. The third and worst Yuletide fire began on Wednesday December 22, 1813, leveling 300 buildings along State Street, like a bomb blast. It raged from where the stone Unitarian Church stands today all the way to the Piscataqua River and out to the tip of the wooden pier there.
Fire feasts on wood, and until that time Market Square was a maze of one and two-story timber-frame buildings linked by dirt roads half the width we know them today. People kept barns, stored hay, used candles and oil lamps, burned wood, cooked in their greasy fireplaces up creosote-choked chimneys. The threat of fire was constantly with them.
CONTINUE FIRES
Assessing the damage
The appearance of modern Portsmouth, with its low brick buildings, is a direct result of the three December fires. The Brick Act of 1814 banned wooden construction downtown. City historic zoning still clings to the "modern" industrial image of Portsmouth forged in that era two centuries past.
We can also trace the rise of modern fire prevention from the three winter infernos. Wooden hand "pumpers" were wholly inadequate and "fire societies" usually served only members who could afford to join. Surprisingly, the main task of early volunteers was not to battle Nature, but to recoup their member’s material goods. Society members carried "bed keys" used to dissemble the valuable family bed for hasty removal. They wore black bags to carry off dishes and silver which they would protect from vandals, who some accused of setting the fires to reap the spoils. One would-be benefactor who rushed to donate $2,000 to charity found his pocket cut away and the money stolen.
Newspaper accounts document the devastation and the recovery from fire. We read about throngs of volunteers from as far away as Newburyport and Salem who rushed to spell the exhausted workers, both men and women, in the leather-bucket brigades. We can track the dollars lost as the most populated part of town burned and burned again. Damage to 200 homes and shops in 1802 came to $200,000 in dollars of that era. A document in the Portsmouth Athenaeum records charitable gifts of $45,410.43 for that fire.
A letter recently discovered in an online auction and now at the Athenaeum shows that native son Tobias Lear, former secretary to George Washington, contributed $200 to the sufferers of the fire of 1813. In his letter thanking Lear, Portsmouth’s John Langdon described the city as "a wilderness of naked chimneys". Langdon’s own mansion with its wide lawn at the corner of Court and Pleasant streets was spared, but the elderly politician was shaken. "We have great reason to fear and tremble seeing we have the Mighty hand of the God of Jacob upon us," he told Lear.
CONTINUE FIRES
Forging a collective memory
As always, the colorful human accounts, not the statistics, stir the emotions that link us to the past. And as usual, we can thank Portsmouth Journal editor Charles W. Brewster for recording the oral history of the city’s great disasters. Born the year of the first blaze in 1802, Brewster kept the memory of fire alive by publishing nostalgic interviews with former victims. Half a dozen of those detailed essays survive in his collection Rambles About Portsmouth published in two volumes. John H. Bowles, a Journal reader, was responding to Brewster’s history column when he wrote the stirring account of his aunt and uncle. These intimate memories of the "awful grandeur of the conflagration", printed in the newspaper of the times, is what speaks to us today.
"In many instances," Bowles wrote to Brewster about the 1813 fire, "the entire fruits of a life of industry were swept away, leaving the sufferers at mid-winter, without a place of shelter, or a dollar to recommence the world anew."
People were shocked, Bowles noted, by the way the fire swallowed up the town. Those who saw the blaze in the distance, in less than an hour, found themselves in the frigid streets. Many moved their possessions to safer locations, then into the streets when those sites too were threatened, only to find the same items swallowed up by fire. The morning after the 1813 fire, with Christmas just two days away, the streets were littered with furniture including fashionable sideboards, still set with Christmas pies baked the day before.
Some residents simply lost their wits, Bowles wrote to Brewster decades later, "causing them to commit absurdities which it afforded them much amusement to relate in after years."
"One good lady, with a houseful of furniture, and the fire but two tenements distant, was running about in a green baize dressing-gown and red woolen cap with an empty bottle in her hand. And another, had three bonnets in her hand and none upon her head."
But in report after report -- with a total of over 500 buildings destroyed – no record of a single death appears. That, local historians continually point out, is the true miracle of Portsmouth’s Christmas fires.
Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson is editor of the history web site SeacoastNH.com and author of the award-winning history of Strawbery Banke Museum, available in bookstores and on Amazon.com.