Stop 6 – The First Major Fire
THE FIRE OF 1860
The first major fire in Nebraska City was also its greatest. On Saturday, May twelfth, eighteen sixty, a fire started behind Coleman's Butcher Shop, near Sixth Street and First Corso. A strong south wind was blowing, and in just three hours, forty-one buildings were destroyed, brick and frame, businesses and homes alike.
The town had no fire equipment and very little water. So citizens turned to saving what they could, carrying papers, records, and merchandise out into the streets. Some of it was lost anyway to the heat and the flying embers. Afterward, hundreds of people picked through the piles looking for their belongings, and then they began clearing the rubble and rebuilding the center of town.
The total loss came to one hundred seven thousand, three hundred dollars, and only about sixty-one thousand of it was insured. Even so, the local paper declared, "Nebraska City still lives."
In the bird's-eye drawing of the city, the red dot marks where the fire started, and the red circle shows the area it destroyed.
ANSWERING THE CALL
In the eighteen hundreds, getting firefighters to a fire wasn't easy. Whoever spotted a fire ran to the nearest engine house and rang a big bell. The volunteers heard it, ran to the engine house, grabbed the equipment, and headed for the fire. If the wind was wrong, only a few of them heard the alarm. By the time they got there, the building was often already engulfed.
And they had to pull that equipment themselves, hand pumpers, hose carts, even the steam pumper, through unpaved streets in rain, snow, or August heat. Sometimes they borrowed farm horses.
The first fire bell was bought in January of eighteen sixty-nine. It weighed three hundred pounds and hung above the engine house on First Corso. In eighteen seventy-two, the companies worked out a way of tapping the bell to signal which ward the fire was in.
In eighteen ninety-four, the city bought a second bell from the Buckeye Bell Foundry in Cincinnati, for one hundred fifty-eight dollars and twenty-four cents. That bell weighs about fifteen hundred pounds, and you can see it today in front of the museum.