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Great Fire of 1901

The Great Fire of 1901 in Jacksonville, Florida was one of the worst disasters in Florida history and the largest urban fire in the Southeast. It was similar in scale and destruction to the 1871 Great Chicago Fire.

The fire

Origin

Around noon of Friday, May 3, 1901 a spark from a kitchen fire during the lunch hour at a mattress factory set mattresses filled with Spanish moss on fire at the factory, located in an area now known as LaVilla. The fire was soon discovered and it was thought they could put it out with only a few buckets of water. Consequently an alarm was not turned on until it had gone beyond their control.

Aftermath

The fire swept through 146 city blocks, destroyed over 2,368 buildings and left almost 10,000 people homeless all in the course of eight hours. It is said the glow from the flames could be seen in Savannah, Georgia; smoke plumes in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Florida Governor William S. Jennings declared a state of martial law in Jacksonville and dispatched several state militia units to help. Reconstruction started immediately, and the city was returned to civil authority on May 17. Despite the widespread damage, only seven deaths were reported.

The George A. Brewster Hospital and School of Nurse Training, which later became Methodist Medical Center, opened to treat African-American victims of the Great Fire of 1901.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, built of bricks in 1887, was the only major church in the city that survived the fire.

Reconstruction

Famed New York architect Henry John Klutho helped rebuild the city. Klutho and other architects, enamored by the "Prairie Style" of architecture then being popularized by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, designed exuberant local buildings with a Florida flair. While many of Klutho's buildings were demolished by the 1980s, a number of his creations remain, including the St. James Building from 1911 (a former department store that is now Jacksonville's City Hall) and the Morocco Temple from 1910. The Klutho Apartments, in Springfield, were recently restored and converted into office space by local charity Fresh Ministries. Despite the losses of the last several decades, Jacksonville still has one of the largest collections of Prairie Style buildings (particularly residences) outside the Midwest.

Racism during the fire

James Weldon Johnson, one of Jacksonville's most famous residents, thought the Great Fire of 1901 might not have caused such destruction if it weren't for the authorities' racism. Johnson, who later became famous as a writer, diplomat and civil rights leader, was the principal of the original Stanton School in Jacksonville at the time of the fire. In his autobiography Along This Way, he recalled that he and his brother Rosamond were riding their bicycles to their parents' home when they saw smoke not far from their house.

Johnson wrote:

We met many people fleeing. From them we gathered excitedly related snatches: the fiber factory catches afire - the fire department comes - fanned by a light breeze, the fire is traveling directly east and spreading out to the north, over the district where the bulk of Negroes in the western end of the city live - the firemen spend all their efforts saving a low row of frame houses just across the street on the south side of the factory, belonging to a white man named Steve Melton.

Johnson also alleged that when people complained to the fire chief, he used a racial slur and said it would be a good thing for blacks' homes to burn. Soon it was too late to change plans.