HISTORY- FIRE STRIKES AREA DURING GREAT CHICAGO FIRE

By Joseph Wiszowaty
SAUK VILLAGE |  Times were tough in the “prairie days” of Sauk Village and the region.  Before George Theobald sold off his 50 acres at the corner of Sauk Trail and what would become the Calumet Expressway.  We’re going back to the days just after the Civil War, when Sauk Village didn’t exist and it was simply a settlement of New Strassburg founded in 1839 along the Great Sauk Indian Trail.  Let’s go back to 1871. 

St. James original church, built in 1847 would have been very
similar to St. John the Evangelist Eucharistic Adoration Chapel in
St. John, Indiana (Photo- John Paul Bender)

The Michigan Central Railway (today the CN Railroad) passed through the area along farmlands of the early settlers.  There were some 50 famer homes scattered about the area.  At the time there stood St. James Catholic Church (referred to by the settlers as St. Jakobs- Germanic for St. James), the building was originally an old log cabin similar to many homes of New Strassburg’s original settlers, who moved to the area in 1839 with his family.

Now comes along the fall time of the year 1871, and a dry fall it was recalls Charles Jabob Sauter, nephew of Vincent Sauter in a 1926 with the Star Newspaper.

On the 8^th day of October, shortly after dinner a freight train going east along the Michigan Central Railroad, dropping fire on the track which very quick started the grass to burning. There was a strong south wind blowing, the fire spread rapidly, Sauter recalled and fire would burn all over the south 80 acres of the farm.  Charles Sauter owned 160 acres north and south of what is now US 30- Lincoln Highway in neighboring Ford Heights, then not even a town.

Sauter remembered that a whirlwind picked up a bunch of blazing corn stalks in James Millars' (April 12, 1826 -  Nov 26, 1877) field which was the southeast corner of present day Cottage Grove east of the present day Ford Stamping Plant.  The tinder was carried aloft by the wind, taking it along for nearly half a mile, to the stack yard in a moment everything, stacks and stabling was ablaze recalled Sauter.  The fire then rapidly made its way across an orchard, and the road where it struck James’ brother’s William Millars (June 7, 1822 – Nov 1, 1877) farm stacks and stabling destroying everything in its way, and finally dying out for the want of further material for it to work on. The farm houses were quite a distance away, which was the only thing that saved them Sauter remembered.

Coincidently, all of this was going on as word was brought to area that the whole city of Chicago was ablaze recalled Sauter.  “Oh, that was a day which has lingered long in my memory” according to Sauter.

While the Great Chicago Fire killed some 300 people and destroyed 3.3 square miles, the fire that hit the area on October 8, 1871, only burned several acres and nobody died.  But the fire never-the-less must have been pretty great to the farmers in the area.