Jump to content

Great Hinckley Fire

Coordinates: 46°0′40″N 92°55′24″W / 46.01111°N 92.92333°W / 46.01111; -92.92333
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Great Hinckley Fire
Date(s)September 1, 1894 to September 6, 1894
3:00 p.m. (CDT)
LocationPine County, near Hinckley, Minnesota, US
Statistics
Burned area200,000 acres (810 km2)
Land useLogging
Impacts
Deaths418+
Ignition
CauseDrought

The Great Hinckley Fire was a conflagration in the pine forests of the U.S. state of Minnesota in September 1894, which burned an area of at least 200,000 acres (810 km2; 310 sq mi)[1] (perhaps more than 250,000 acres [1,000 km2; 390 sq mi]), including the town of Hinckley. The official death count was 418; the actual number of fatalities was likely higher.[2] Other sources put the death toll at 476.[3]

Description

[edit]

After a two-month summer drought, combined with very high temperatures, several small fires started in the pine forests of Pine County, Minnesota. The fires' spread apparently was due to the then-common method of lumber harvesting, wherein trees were stripped of their branches in place; these branches littered the ground with flammable debris. Also contributing was a temperature inversion that trapped the gases from the fires. The scattered blazes united into a firestorm.[4] The temperature rose to at least 2,000 °F (1,100 °C). Barrels of nails melted into one mass, and in the yards of the Eastern Minnesota Railroad, the wheels of the cars fused with the rails.[5] Some residents escaped by climbing into wells, ponds, or the Grindstone River. Others clambered aboard trains that had come in on the Eastern Minnesota Railway and St. Paul & Duluth Railroad lines from The North.

The Eastern Minnesota Train

At 2:45 in the afternoon, The Eastern Minnesota Railway's Superior-Hinckley freight train came into town from the north. This train consisted of Eastern engine #105, three boxcars and a caboose. It was being run by engineer Edward Barry, who already sensed that something was wrong. The railyards beyond the depot had already begun to burn and the town was empty (many residents had gone off to fight the fire). A passenger train consisting of Great Northern engine #125 and six coaches being run by engineer William Best was due to come in behind his freighter at 3:25, and barry hoped that it was on time. Much to his relief it was, and this train came to a halt at the station where a small crowd had gathered to board.

The train's conductor, George Powers, went into the station to inquire about the conditions of the track south of town. After realizing that it was impassable, powers spotted Barry's freighter sitting nearby on the sidetrack and had an idea. He proposed hooking the two trains together and using best's coaches and Barry's boxcars to carry refugees to safety. Both crews agreed, and Barry reversed off of the sidetrack and attached his engine to the rear coach of William Best's train. Residents mobbed the train, and a great deal of lives were saved by William Best when he applied the airbrakes as Barry tried to pull out. This held the train long enough to save hundreds of lives before powers ordered the train to move off.

Running in reverse, they pulled out of the threatened town only minutes ahead of the fire, stopping first at Sandstone before crossing the kettle river and being chased by the flames for a considerable distance. Later that night the train made it to the safety of Superior with over 800 people jammed onboard.

The St. Paul & Duluth Train.

James Root, the engineer of the St. Paul & Duluth Railroad's No. 4 "Duluth Limited" train, heading for Saint Paul from Duluth, rescued nearly 300 people by backing up his train nearly five miles to Skunk Lake, where the passengers took cover in the swamp from the fire. Root had halted his train one mile north of town, and as he began to reverse an explosion lit the train on fire. Despite this, Root threw open the throttle and made a mad dash to safety, going so fast that he had outrun the fire by 10 minutes.[6][7]

According to the Hinckley Fire Museum:

Because of the dryness of the summer, fires were common in the woods, along railroad tracks and in logging camps where loggers would set fire to their slash to clean up the area before moving on. Some loggers, of course left their debris behind, giving any fire more fuel on which to grow. Saturday, September 1st, 1894 began as another oppressively hot day with fires surrounding the towns and two major fires that were burning about five miles (8.0 km) to the south. To add to the problem, the temperature inversion that day added to the heat, smoke and gases being held down by the huge layer of cool air above. The two fires managed to join together to make one large fire with flames that licked through the inversion finding the cool air above. That air came rushing down into the fires to create a vortex or tornado of flames which then began to move quickly and grew larger and larger turning into a fierce firestorm. The fire first destroyed the towns of Mission Creek and Brook Park before coming into the town of Hinckley. When it was over the Firestorm had completely destroyed six towns, and over 400 square miles (1,000 km2) lay black and smoldering. The firestorm was so devastating that it lasted only four hours but destroyed everything in its path.[8]

Aftermath

[edit]

The fire destroyed the town of Hinckley (which at the time had a population of over 1,400) as well as the smaller nearby settlements of Mission Creek, Pokegama, Sandstone, Miller, and Partridge.[2]

The exact number of fatalities is difficult to determine. The official coroner's report counted 413 dead while the fire's official monument notes 418.[2][9] An unknown number of Native Americans and backcountry dwellers were also killed in the fire; bodies continued to be found years later.[10][11] It is second only to the 1918 Cloquet Fire (where 453 were killed) as the deadliest in Minnesota history, and the third deadliest in U.S. history, after the Peshtigo Fire.

Memorials

[edit]
The Hinckley Fire Museum

Today, a 37-mile (60 km) section of the Willard Munger State Trail, from Hinckley to Barnum, is a memorial to the fire and the devastation it caused. In the town of Hinckley, on Highway 61, the Hinckley Fire Museum is located in the former Northern Pacific Railway depot. It is located a few feet north of the former depot, which burned down in the fire. It is open from May 1 until the end of October.[12]

Lutheran Memorial Cemetery in Hinckley has a historical marker and granite obelisk as a memorial to those who perished in the fire. 248 residents of Hinckley perished in the fire and are buried in a mass grave at this cemetery. Some are unidentified.

The Brook Park Cemetery on County Road 126, south of Minnesota State Highway 23, has an historical marker plaque and a memorial to the 23 fire victims of Brook Park, with a tall obelisk on top of a granite marker.[13]

Boston Corbett

[edit]

Thomas P. "Boston" Corbett, the Union soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth after Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln, is rumored to have died in the fire. His last known residence is believed to have been a forest settlement near Hinckley, and a "Thomas Corbett" is listed as one of the dead or missing.[14][15][16] In September 2024, a presentation given to the 36th International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences, showed that the man who died in the Hinckley fire was Thomas Gilbert Corbitt, originally from Steuben County, New York, and not Boston Corbett. Proofs included the Civil War "invalid" filing by Thomas G. Corbitt, dated September 19, 1890, in Minnesota and on the same document, the widow's filing on August 9, 1895. Another proof included a newspaper article from the September 24, 1894, edition of the Steuben Farmers Advocate, announcing that Thomas Corbitt, formerly of Thurston, Steuben County, New York, had perished in the Hinckley fire.[17][better source needed]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Haines, Donald A.; Sando, Rodney W. (1969). "Climatic Conditions Preceding Historical Great Fires in the North Central Region". North Central Experimentation Forest Service. US Department of Agriculture.
  2. ^ a b c "The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894". Archived from the original on August 7, 2014. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
  3. ^ Headlines and Heros. A Treasury of Railroad Folklore. New York, Bonaza Books, 1953
  4. ^ "Early Hinckley - before and after the fire". Seans.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved October 9, 2010.
  5. ^ Snow, Richard F. (May 1977). "The Hinckley Fire". American Heritage. Archived from the original on December 14, 2009. Retrieved September 24, 2010.
  6. ^ "Little-known Canadian saved hundreds of lives". Canada's History Magazine, Online. Archived from the original on November 14, 2011. Retrieved July 6, 2012.
  7. ^ "The Life of the Pullman Porter". SCSRA.
  8. ^ "Early Hinckley – before and after the fire". Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved April 27, 2017.
  9. ^ Wilkinson, William (1895). Memorials of the Minnesota Forest Fires in the Year 1894. N. E. Wilkinson. pp. 103–125.
  10. ^ Lyseth, Alaina Wolter (2014). Hinckley and the Fire of 1894. Arcadia Publishing. p. 10. ISBN 9781467112963.
  11. ^ Brown, Daniel (2006). Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. Globe Pequot. p. 202.
  12. ^ "Hinckley Fire MUSEUM". Archived from the original on March 25, 2016. Retrieved April 27, 2017.
  13. ^ "Brook Park Cemetery Monuments". Retrieved April 27, 2017.
  14. ^ Lincoln Herald, Vol. 86, Lincoln Memorial University Press, 1984, pp. 152–155
  15. ^ Kubicek, Earl C, "The Case of the Mad Hatter", Lincoln Herald, Vol. 83, Lincoln Memorial University Press, 1981, pp. 708–719
  16. ^ Clayton, W.W., History of Steuben County, NY, p. 390
  17. ^ "Presentation Abstracts | American Ancestors". www.americanancestors.org. Retrieved June 30, 2025.

Further reading

[edit]
[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Great Hinckley Fire.

46°0′40″N 92°55′24″W / 46.01111°N 92.92333°W / 46.01111; -92.92333

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Hinckley_Fire&oldid=1302678834"