Mrs. Wilsons True Tales Retold

“It was the completeness of the wreck; the total desolation which met the eye on every hand; the utter blankness of what had a few hours before been so full of life, of associations, of aspirations, of all things which kept the mind of a Chicagoan so constantly driven.”
 ––– Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration, 1871The web site----The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory Copyright © 1996 by the Chicago Historical Society and the Trustees of Northwestern University----describes the aftermath of the fire this way: Devastated Chicago remained so hot that it took a day or two before it was possible even to begin a survey of the physical damage. According to the papers, in some instances when anxious businessmen opened their safes among the rubble of what was once their offices, precious contents that had survived the inferno suddenly burst into flame on exposure to the air. Shortly after the fire, Stephen L. Robinson, a North Division resident