Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1887 — PITISBURG ABLAZE. [ARTICLE]

PITISBURG ABLAZE.

The Most Disastrous Conflagration Since the Riotsot 1877. The Entire Fire Department Combat the Flames Four Long Hours —Masonic Hall and Several Magnificent Buildings Destroyed—Loss 8500,000. Pittsburg was visited Friday night with the most disastrous conflagration known in that city since the riot fires of 1877. The alarm was turned in at !) o’clock and for four continuous hours the entire fire department contended against the flame before over comming it. The flames started in the rear of the*Masonic building. On three sides were solid brick buildings forming a quadrangle, encompassing a quarter of an acre of tinder boxes. Alarm after alarm followed each other, and within forty-five minutes the fire machinery of five districts was on the ground. But hose, and engines, and trucks, and axes, were powerlets to deal with the blazing furnace the glowed in seething defiance at two score noasdes, in the hands of a hundred firemen. On the east side was the loftiest building in he city , the Hamilton, which towered nine stories above the flames that licked its base. Seven stories from the ground it presented a solid wall of brick, which offer-

ed no opening for the firemen to work upon that side. The front, on Fifth avenue, also prevented an advantageous placing of the firemen, and with the roaring fire increasing in volume and extent at eve ry second, there were but two sides at which the firemen could work. The rear was a narrow alley, and with all the odds against them the firemen seemed to have been called to a hopeless contest with the flames.Butthey rallied on the second-story roofs at the west side, while a half a dozen streams guarded the front on fifth avenue. The pipemen could not get within one hundred feet of the firey crater. Though at work at a safe elevation from the hottest of the fire, it singed their hair and scorched their eyeballs; but the thundering engine%seemed to be but idle play for all the headway made against the fire. There was not much wind, and the sparks and burning fire-brands shot out from the pit of flames and soared lazily over the roofs of the business blocks on both sides of Fifth avenue. On every roof for two squares were men with buckets and extinguishers, putting out j the sparks and brands that dropped in a heavy shower over the buildings for a solid square. The lurid tongues of flame seemed to attack half the city. Fifth avenue, a narrow thoroughfare, was one solid, impassable jam. Through this crowd the firemen had to lay their lipes with the aid of squads of policemen, who alone could force respect by the free use of maceß. Section after section of hose was burst by the high pressure under which the engines were working, a difficulty that was increased by the tramping of thousands of, feet upon the lines. At 11 p. m. the surging flames rolled in ascending billows to the higfit of the roofs upon which the pipemen were stationed, and it then seemed that the destruction of the entire block , and $(>,000,000 worth of property was inevitable. It was at this hour that the Hamilton building; five stories higher than the structures which flanked it, caught from the crackling area of whitehot coals that glowed alongside. The longest ladders were far too short to reach the elevation at which the second conflagration began. The Hamilton structure extends entirely through the block to Virgin alley. A long ladder | was run up to the rear and a detail of firemen slowly dragged and toiled upward with a line of hose. —When the fifth story windows bad been almost

reached, the water was turned on at a frightful pressure. The shock almost hurled the men at the nozzle from the ladder. The wriggling, tortuous hose writhed in their grasp. To release it wouid have been to have stripped those lower down from the lofty ladder. With cool resolution,., hpwever, the men pointed the stream directly aloft, and clung to the swaying, elastic ladder that at every moment threatened to careen to the pavement below. In this perilous, agonizing position they clung for fully four minutes before the eyes of the horror-stricken crowd. The word reached jthe erfd of the line, and the wicked stream was cut off. By this tinffe the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the Hamilton building were ablaze, and no stream of water could more than touch the fringe of the lame along the lower side. The Dispatch building was then only separated from the fire by an intervening structure, the Schmidt & Friday building. The printers in the fifth story, almost suffocated by the roasting sirocco that drove through the windows, abandoned their “cases” and stampeded down the stairways. The flames were got under control at 2:30 a. m., Saturday. The Hamilton building, Masonic Hall and a number of tenement houses were totally destroyed. The loss is estimated at $500,000.