Category: Stories

The Martin Joseph Villers family was traveling in October 1871. They were Wisconsin residents, but not from Peshtigo. How they ended up there that fateful evening is still a mystery.

When the fires struck the town, Martin and his wife, Octavia, prepared to flee to the Peshtigo River. They put their baby, Florence, in a basket, and turned to retrieve something from the house.  A moment was all it took for the fire to separate them.

Joseph LaCrosse was a 14-year-old orphan who lived with the Villers. He was near Florence with the fire separated them from her parents. He grabbed the baby and climbed into a well, holding her as the flames raged above them. The next morning, he climbed out of the well with baby Florence and saw that nothing remained of the city of Peshtigo. As he wandered in search of the Villers and other survivors, he came across a cow that was partially burned but had survived the fire. He drew milk into his hand and fed the baby.

Miraculously, Martin and Octavia also survived.

To honor the young boy that saved Florence Cayemberg nee Villers’ life, her descendants bought a memorial stone. It was placed in the walkway outside Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Due to the courage and quick thinking of Joseph LaCrosse, there are now over 500 descendants of Florence and her husband, Eli Cayemberg.

To see the complete story written by one of Florence’s descendants, see The Worst Fire in American History Was Not in Chicago.

Fireballs rained and hot air rushed ahead of the main fire, detonating and exploding buildings—and people—faster than it took to describe the scenes. Women and girls were especially vulnerable. The combination of layers of clothing and higher fat content in their bodies intensified the heat, just as a covering wrapped around a lighted candle. People recalled the sight of sixteen-year-old Helga Rockstead running down the boardwalk, desperately trying to outrun the flames. Her waist-length hair streaming behind her caught fire, and her head burst into flame. She was immediately wrapped in a sheet of fire.

Most stories of the fire are about people desperately trying to save themselves and their families. The young man John Cox, however, courageously helped a stranger—a young woman named Kate Guillfoyle—find safety in the river. Even with the town burning around them, John noticed Kate was pretty. And Kate must have seen him as her knight in shining armor. Within a few weeks, the two were married.

Some survivors suffered for hours or even days, agonizing over the unknown fate of their loved ones.

Charles Albrecht lived with his wife and three children in a house on Emery Street, west of the Peshtigo River. He worked as a carpenter and at the time of the fire was employed on a project near the Peshtigo Harbor. His oldest, nine-year-old Louise, was keeping Mrs. Friedrich Aust company at the Aust farm in the Lower Sugar Bush. Mr. Aust was also away, cutting hay near the harbor. With all the talk of fires, she did not want to be alone.

When the fire approached the house, Mrs. Aust and Louise ran to nearby Trout Creek. Though the creek bed was almost dry, the two found a pool of water and immersed themselves.

Meanwhile, back in town, Mrs. Albrecht, though worried about her husband and elder daughter, focused on saving four-year-old Mary and baby Louis. They also found refuge in the same Trout Creek near its junction with the Peshtigo River,  several miles from where her daughter was huddled (now near the location of the middle/high school).

The harbor was east of the path the fire took, so Charles Albrecht survived. Mr. Aust, however—though also working in the harbor area—is thought to have succumbed to the gases that accompanied the fire. He is buried in a small cemetery on Bundy Creek.

It is impossible to comprehend the agony and horror Mr. Albrecht suffered as he walked back to town, looking for his family in the bodies he came upon. And to imagine the joy when the whole family was reunited.

Many people thought plowed fields would provide protection from the fire, and they often do in a regular forest fire. This, however, was not a normal fire, and most who sought refuge in a clearing perished. An exception is the Bakeman family.

Henry Bakeman lived with his wife and six children in the Lower Sugar Bush. There was no stream nearby, so when the fire approached, he gathered his family in the middle of his clearing. They were joined by the neighbor’s eight children as well—Henry Bartells believed the larger clearing at the Bakeman farm would provide better protection for his children. Bakeman told everyone to lie down, and with his hands, he covered his wife and all fourteen children with soil except for their faces. Then he hit the ground and covered himself as much as possible. His resourcefulness saved the lives of his family and all of the neighbor’s children.

After the fire, Bakeman and Bartels began a rescue mission in the Sugar Bush area. Somehow they obtained a wagon and were able to take survivors to the tent field hospital on the only surviving farm in the area (Abram Place) or to the makeshift hospital at Dunlap House in Marinette. These were the gentlemen to pick up Karl Lamp (see his story).

The family of J. E. Beebe—he, his wife, and four children—were running for the river. Both parents and three of the children were struck down by the flames, but the four-year-old daughter was unhurt. She was seen and snatched up by a cobbler, Fred Guse, who carried her to the river. She clung to his shoulders while he found some protection in the deep water. His face and neck were burned, but the child was unharmed.

This child’s mother was the daughter of Governor Henry P. Baldwin of Michigan. When he came to Peshtigo to claim his granddaughter, he heard the story of her rescue. In gratitude, he gave Guse $500—enough money in those days that he was able to establish a business in Chicago.

Governor Baldwin also saw areas of his state burn on the same day as the Peshtigo Fire. On both sides of the state, 23 townships had burned, and another 18 townships were partially destroyed. Holland, Manistee, and Port Huron were especially hard hit. Fourteen thousand square miles were blackened and it is unknown how many people died (estimates range from 50 to over 1,000). Thousands were left destitute.

Abram Place, originally from Vermont, was the second largest landowner in the area. He also worked at the Peshtigo Company. Yet people looked down him because he had married a Native American woman. He regularly welcomed Native Americans to his home—they warned him that fire was coming.

To prepare, Abram and his sons created a firebreak around their large, two-story house, as well as the barns. They removed dried leaves and branches around the buildings, then dug trenches three feet deep, down to the moist soil devoid of fuel for a potential fire. Most people dismissed his actions as those of a crazy man who had married a Native American.

When the fire approached, Mrs. Place’s relatives came to help save the house. They spent hours wetting and re-wetting blankets and putting them on the roof.

It was probably a combination of preparedness and luck that saved the Place home; it was one of the few buildings still standing in the three settlements in the Sugar Bush. Plowed fields and wet blankets were not universally effective in the firestorm.

After the fire, the Place home became a field hospital. Over 50 victims walked, staggered, or were carried to the homestead. After the fire, the prejudiced neighbors didn’t let their qualms about Mrs. Place keep them from seeking help at her home.

“Wake up! The end of the world is coming!” Mrs. Amelia “Stoney” Desrochers recalled her mother shouting when she was only five years old. The blaze reached their home at about 9 p.m.

“There had been fires all along. The men had been fighting them,” Desrocher said. “One night a terrible wind storm came, and the sky got very red.”

“A lot of people perished because they thought it was the end of the world. They got tired of fighting the fire and gave up,” she said.

But her family would not give up the fight. Her mother woke up the children, and Desrochers remembered putting on her shoes, forgetting her stockings.

“When we went out, the wind was blowing the sand so hard that it punched my limbs,” she said. “People told us to go to the river. A man at the bridge ordered us to get aboard a flat-bottomed barge on the river.”

But as the boat traveled down the river, it caught fire, and many jumped out and drowned. Desrochers remembered telling her mother as she looked out the boat’s window, “Look, it’s snowing fire three miles out in the bay.”

“On our way back after the fire died down, we passed a place where there were many dead people laid out on blankets by the river bank,” said Desrochers. “Besides them was a little baby crying—I’ll never forget that.”

Desrochers lived her entire life in the Peshtigo area. She and another survivor, Wesley Duket, spent their last years at the Eklund Convalescent Home and occasionally met to reminisce.

Story courtesy Peshtigo Times. Can be found in the special edition “Remembering the Peshtigo Fire,” available for purchase at the Fire Museum.

“When balls of fire started coming down from the sky, my mother and father took us to the spring and wrapped us in wet quilts,” said Wesley Duket, who lived in Sugar Bush, five miles from Harmony Corners. “My sister saved the sewing machine by wrapping it up, too.”

“We had a team of oxen. One of them stayed at the spring with us, and the other strayed away and burned,” Duket said. “We had a shed of colts, and you could hear them thrashing as they burned. My brother wanted to open the shed door, but my sister was afraid he would burn to death too.”

Duket said he would never forget the events that took place the next morning.

“My mother and father were (temporarily) blind. I went to see Mrs. Reinhart, our neighbor, and I found her dead,” he recalled. “I liked her a lot and that really hurt me. Her shawl had not completely burned, and I took the corner that was left and kept it with me for many years.”

Story courtesy the Peshtigo Times

Anna was only nine days old on the day of the fire. She was born in Peshtigo on Sept. 29, 1871, and was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lars Korstad.

Her father came from Norway in 1864 and worked for the next three years to save enough money for his wife’s passage to the States. When she joined him in 1867, they moved to Peshtigo.

Anna, the couple’s first child, was born at night while Lars was at work. Their home was a one-room shanty with a sawdust floor. Sawdust was also the foundation for any bedding in the Korstad house. Her father was a millwright for the Ogden and Gardner lumber camps and mills.

The family was fortunate enough to reach the river when the fire struck.

“We sat on a raft covered with a feather bed, my mother holding me and my father spilling water over the three of us as fast as he could so our clothing would not catch fire—but mother’s clothing burned nearly off her back,” said Iverson.

“Help came from the south and even from Europe. Each family was given $50 and free passage to any point in the U.S. Father thought of going to California, but he chose LaCrosse,” she recalled.

Story courtesy Peshtigo Times