![]() The first was the "simple but quaint fountain. The fire signaled the passing of this old order through its destruction of two emblems of that world in the Arnold garden. The different versions of the account lavish attention on the lilacs, elms, barn, and greenhouse that were trappings of a settled village life, already under siege before the fire, that would no longer be possible in the rebuilt modern city. The house was also well known for its lush and varied landscaping. The gracious Arnold home took up the entire block bordered by Erie, Huron, Rush, and Pine (now Michigan Avenue) Streets, and it contained a library of eight thousand history, literature, and law books, as well as a Lincoln and Civil War collection that was one of the much-mourned cultural casualties of the fire. Arnold family, which appeared in the Evening Post and was reprinted in several other newspapers and fire histories, expressed a longing for a finer world now beyond recapture. A description of the destruction of the North Division residence of the Isaac N. Some of this nostalgia, expressed with more subtlety, was in the earliest accounts of the fire. The implication was that these people somehow came with the fire or the fire forced "us" to live with "them," with unhappy and unpleasant results. ![]() Life was better in the old days because Chicago was a simple and moral human community that did not have the kind of people "we" didn't like, or at least "they" were not so obtrusive. Hubbard, as to so many older people in all times and places, the best was what had been, not what would be, and what others called progress was a regrettable decline. ![]() The Sabbath was kept holy, and the people were mostly such as we wished to associate with." To Mrs. Writing near the turn of the century, the aged Mary Ann Hubbard complained, "Chicago was a much pleasanter place to live in then than it is now, or has been since 'The Fire.' The people with whom we associated were all friendly and kind, sharing each other's joys and sorrows, and enjoying simple pleasures. ![]() For some individuals, including a few of the old settlers, it became the focus of their nostalgic yearnings for a better day that could never be reclaimed. In respect to both it is a case of 'before' or 'after.'" The local population seized upon the disaster as an historical marker that would help them frame and understand urban experience and this period of rapid change in terms of the fire's own unpredictable and dramatic, violent and destructive, decisive and irreversible qualities.Īs time passed, there were those who looked back on the fire wistfully. Milner told a friend less than a week after the event, "an age has closed, and a new epoch…is about to begin." This "new epoch," Milner added ominously, is "obscured in doubt and uncertainty." The following day Cassius Milton Wicker wrote to his family, "Everything will date from the great fire now." Four decades later, Frederick Francis Cook confirmed their predictions in his memoir, Bygone Days in Chicago: "As in our national life the old regime is divided from the new by the Civil War of 1861," he explained, "so in the minds of Chicagoans the city's past is demarcated from the present by the great fire of 1871. No matter what anyone thought the fire meant, for good or ill, everybody agreed that it marked a moment of major transition in Chicago history.
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