Gelded Age Boston

Abstract

ON 9 November 1872, flames engulfed Boston's ceirtral business district. For thirty-five hours, the fire burned unchecked. By a stroke of luck, only fourteen people were killed, but thousands watched as their jobs went up in smoke. In the end, 776 buildings, valued at more than $73.5 million, were destroyed. All for the want of a few horses. There is no greater example of the dependence of nineteenth-century cities on horses than the great Boston fire of 1872. Boston's Fire Department relied on horses to pull its equipment, even steam-pumping engines (see fig. 1). In the week the blaze broke out in Boston, the city fire department was immobilized by an influenza epizootic, the animal equivalent of a human epidemic, which caused fits of sneezing and coughing, lung infections, and general debility among the equine population. Veterinarians ordered complete rest, and many horses that were worked in defiance of that recommendation frequently developed pneumonia and died. With the vast majority of the city's horses too weak to perform their assigned duties, the municipality responded to its emergency by employing humans to haul the steam-powered pumpers, but manpower alone proved insufficient to avert disaster. Only half of Boston's central business district remained standing on lo November.'