“Great Fire of 1881” the marker read, followed by a 90-word summation of one of the deadliest — perhaps the deadliest — fire events in Michigan history.
Snyder is a historian who knows a thing or two about fires. As vice chairman of the Antique Toy and Firehouse Museum in Bay City, his work involves hunting down and bringing life to antiquities tied to firefighting’s past, particularly in Michigan.
While he was familiar with the fire that tore across the state’s Thumb 144 years ago — when it killed 282 people and reduced nearly 1 million Michigan acres to barren land in just two days — the weight of the disaster’s impact on the region wasn’t in the front of his mind on the day he traveled to Bay Port. Not until the marker reminded him.
“It was just there, on the side of the road,” Snyder said of the sign. “Until that particular moment, I hadn’t really thought about it while I was there, but there it was.”
Generations have passed since the fire reshaped the landscape of four counties. The last survivors died decades ago. Communities were rebuilt. And the winds carried away the ashes from that terrible inferno a long, long, long time ago.
Still, all these ages later, the “Great Fire of 1881″ in some ways still burns. To Snyder, it was a historical event with lessons that remain relevant now — in January 2025 — as fires ravage Southern California and scientists sound alarms about record-shattering temperatures across the globe.
To Snyder, that marker planted on the side of the road in Bay Port represents something more than a historical account.
It’s a warning from the past.
The tinderbox
Though separated by nearly 150 years, the “Great Fire of 1881″ in Michigan shares striking similarities with the fires still burning across Los Angeles, Snyder said.
In both cases, a season of drought made for fire-friendly environmental conditions while severe winds provided a mechanism for carrying blazes quickly across the land, he said.
The 1881 fire also led to practices for preventing future fires in Michigan, including a public resource — known today as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources — implementing preventative measures to avoid disasters in the future, Snyder said.
“Their mission of preparing and cleaning public lands of dead wood scrap; those are lessons that haven’t been fully implemented in the Los Angeles region,” Snyder said. “It’s one piece of a very complicated equation that has resulted in the disaster that’s unfolding before our eyes right now.”
Still, the fire of 1881 had its own unique circumstances, during a time in history very different from the Los Angeles of today — or even the Michigan of today.
What was life like back then in Michigan? In the 1880s, the state’s timber industry was the nation’s leading lumber producer, and farming dominated the livelihood of residents there.
The population was far smaller than today. According to U.S. Census records, 10 million people resided in Michigan in 2020 compared to 1.6 million people in 1880. Most Michigan communities were settled by Americans only a few decades earlier, after all. The home of the “Great Fire of 1881” historical marker, Bay Port, was established in 1851, for example.
Michigan communities in 1881 were no strangers to the dangers of fires, Snyder said. In fact, only 10 years earlier, a series of infernos charred an even larger chunk of Michigan land than the 1881 disaster. Those fires of 1871 erupted the same day as two other historical Midwest blazes historians now reference as the “Great Chicago Fire” and the “Peshtigo Fire” in Wisconsin.
The Michigan death toll from the 1871 fires — which also impacted the Thumb region — remains unknown.
Snyder said the 1871 fires likely played a role in the 1881 blaze that raced across the counties of Huron, Lapeer, Sanilac and Tuscola from Sept. 5-6.
“There was still a lot of dead wood left over from the fire in 1871,” Snyder said. “That really added to the fuel load that started the fire 10 years later.”
Another potential factor in the fire’s beginnings: People at the time were intentionally setting fires that were aimed at transforming forest-like environments into acreage suitable for farming, Snyder said.
“It’s pretty well recognized that there were a number of fires being (started) for land-clearing purposes at the time,” he said. “When you have that, the wind, and then these dry conditions, it all added up to one conflagration that started south and east of Saginaw, and then literally wiped out most of the Thumb.”
An unstoppable force
Firefighting resources in 1881 were primitive by today’s standards, Snyder said. Back then, crews doused flames using hand-pumped extinguishers.
Despite being surrounded by lakes, 19th-century American communities did not possess access to the same kind of public water utilities used by today’s firefighters. Residents largely gathered their water from wells. And, because of the drought that year, many of those wells were dry, or close to it.
“You just didn’t have the infrastructure back then to really support any kind of organized response,” he said.
Regardless, a response from the firefighting departments that existed in 1881 was rendered largely inconsequential because of the speed of the fires. The high winds carried the flames too fast for the public safety agencies of the day to mount an adequate remedy, Snyder said.
“This fire basically swept through the Thumb in two days,” he said. “So, there wasn’t any stopping it.
The blaze was extinguished partly due to changing wind directions and because little unburned timber remained in the region, Snyder said.
Some of the wood that burned in those two days included the estimated 3,400 Thumb-area homes and buildings destroyed, leaving residents scrambling for safety.
The fire’s speed and limited communication tools of the time meant many families fled without knowing if they were moving toward safety or further danger.
“Most of the stories of survival, as this wall of fire was coming at them, involved farmers who would try to go find some type of ditch, or some type of area with water,” Snyder said. “And they would basically submerge themselves and use that water as kind of a protective barrier.”
Other accounts describe residents fleeing in horse-drawn carriages, depicted in historical illustrations that offer the only visual record of the fire’s chaos as it was happening.
“Unfortunately, a lot of those are sad stories of people who could not outrun the fire,” Snyder said. “Entire families were wiped out in that area.”
Lessons from the ruins
The 1881 fire marked a pivotal moment in emergency response history. The American Red Cross, established just four months earlier, launched its first disaster relief effort, aiding Michigan residents impacted by the fire.
The nonprofit collected food and supplies, which were shipped to Michigan to help assist 14,000 people, largely left homeless in a burned-and-barren land on the eve of the winter season.
“Their response was really impactful,” Snyder said. “They were providing temporary shelter, clothing, and also getting supplies for the farmers so they could plant in the subsequent year. Without any of those, you couldn’t survive through the winter or start planning for the spring. That was really how people made it through the winter.”
The response to the 1881 fire offered a template for future disaster responses from the American Red Cross, an organization that continues to provide emergency relief resources, including for people impacted by the California fires still raging today.
Snyder said he hopes officials in public emergency management positions learn from the circumstances that led to the California fires this month — and the Michigan fire from 143 years ago, for that matter — to limit the need for future disaster relief efforts.
“The loss of life and loss of property and all the other pain and suffering — some of these could be reduced substantially by us truly internalizing and learning these lessons,” Snyder said.
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