Stop 14 – Fires of the Late 1800s

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THE HAWKE'S STORE FIRE, 1887

At five forty-five in the morning on February twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty-seven, a clerk named Stephen Kennedy, who slept in a room at the back of Hawke's Store, woke up to smoke. The store stood at the southeast corner of Sixth Street and Central Avenue.

He ran to the engine house and gave the alarm, but the bell wasn't rung very loudly, and at first only a few firemen came. The volunteers fought hard to keep the fire in the one building, but it spread to the Odd Fellows and Masonic Lodge building next door.

Then the water ran out. The cistern at City Hall went dry, then the one on Sixth Street, and the crews had to move all the way to Ninth Street just when they nearly had the fire under control. Lincoln's fire department sent an engine by special train on the Burlington line. It arrived at two-forty that afternoon.

For five hours, firemen fought from the third story. Then the west side of the Hawke Building collapsed, taking a number of men down with it. Remarkably, only three were hurt. William Lee was pinned under falling timbers and had to be sawed out. In the end, the fire was held to the two buildings, and both were a total loss.

THE LEVI LIVERY STABLE FIRE, 1881, AND OTHER FIRES

At two in the morning on February twenty-first, eighteen eighty-one, fire broke out at the L. Levi Livery Stable, at eight twenty-three Central Avenue. Four men were asleep in the front of the barn. The fire started in the hayloft, and smoke poured down into the stable, blinding them.

Few firemen answered the alarm at first, so Officer Watkins went to the scene and called for citizens to help bring up the engine and hose cart. Horses were found, and the steamer was taken to the Ninth Street cistern, but a bad flue kept it from working well.

The stable was destroyed, though the fire didn't spread. Two men, John Jackson and Otto Kalb, lost their lives, along with thirty horses.

Those weren't the only big fires. There's a list at the bottom of this panel. The Platte Valley Bank burned in eighteen fifty-eight. In eighteen seventy, every building on the north side of Central Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets was lost. And in eighteen seventy-five, fire destroyed the Reed Plow Manufacturing Company and the Third Ward school.