Great Seattle Fire - Events of The Fire

Events of The Fire

On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, John E. Back, a worker in Victor Clairmont's cabinet-making shop near Front Street and Madison Avenue, was heating glue over a gasoline fire. Sometime around 2:30 pm, the glue boiled over and caught fire. The fire soon spread to the wood chips and turpentine covering the floor. Back attempted to douse the fire with water which only served to spread the fire further. The fire department arrived by 2:45, but by that time the area was so smokey that the source of the fire could not be determined. At first it was assumed to have begun in the paint shop above Clairmont's woodworking shop and the Seattle newspaper erroneously ran this story the next day.

Read more about this topic:  Great Seattle Fire

Famous quotes containing the words events of, events and/or fire:

    Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.
    Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 3:2.