1901 – May 3, the Great Jacksonville Fire, Jacksonville, FL — >7

–>7 Cowart, John. Heroes All: A History of Firefighting in Jacksonville, Florida. 2008, p. 49-50.
— 7 Jacksonville Historical Society. “The Great Fire of 1901.” 2019.

Narrative Information

Cowart: “…the Great Jacksonville Fire…May 3, 1901. When that day was over 2,358 buildings had burned; 466 acres covering 140 city blocks smoldered; 10,000 homeless people camped out; and at least seven bodies were found. Witnesses reported that the flames could be seen as far away as Savannah, Georgia, and the smoke plume as far as Raleigh, N.C.” (Cowart, John. Heroes All: A History of Firefighting in Jacksonville, Florida. 2008, p. 49-50.)

Jacksonville Historical Society: “On the warm morning of May 3rd, 1901, a tragic event was about to change Jacksonville. Around noon, a spark from a small wood-burning cook stove set ablaze some of the Spanish moss laid out to dry at the American Fiber Company, located at Beaver and Davis Streets downtown. With the aid of a strong westerly wind, the fire soon consumed the shanties that surrounded the factory, and the burning debris jumped along hundreds of wood-shingled rooftops that were already dangerously dry after a prolonged drought.

“James Munoz, a native of Venezuela who was reared and educated in New York (and would eventually settle on Riverside’s Row), described the leaping path of fire:

I saw then that [my own residence] was in the path of the flames and would probably be destroyed, but the fire was still several blocks away and it seemed to me there would be plenty of time. In this I was mistaken. I had been fortunate enough to secure a cab and in this I placed my children with their nurse. …As we drove away in the cab I found my hat was on fire; then the back of my coat and the back of the nurse’s dress were almost in flames. The small articles we had attempted to bring away from my burning home, for our immediate use, caught fire as the cab was driven away. I took my children to the house of an acquaintance over a mile away diagonally across the city, at the extreme end of Bay Street. Here I thought they would be safe. In little more than an hour the flames had burned across the entire town and this house was in flames. Then, with other citizens, I sent my children to the country. During the afternoon I was in the fight to stop the onward sweep of the flames. It was, from the very first, a perfectly hopeless effort.

“In just over eight hours, the flames swept through 146 city blocks, destroying over 2,000 buildings, taking seven lives, and leaving almost 10,000 people homeless…. By the time the fire was brought under control at 8:30 p.m., it had destroyed nearly everything in a 2-mile swath across the city.

“The Great Fire was the most destructive event in Jacksonville’s history, wiping out 2,368 buildings while leaving nearly 10,000 people homeless and destroying the majority of Downtown Jacksonville (miraculously, only seven persons died). It was the largest metropolitan fire to have occurred in the South, before or since.” (Jacksonville Historical Society. “The Great Fire of 1901.” 2019.)

Sources

Cowart, John W. Heroes All: A History of Firefighting in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, FL: Bluefish Books, 2008. Accessed 10-24-2022 at: http://www.cowart.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/EB%20Heroes%20All.pdf

Jacksonville Historical Society. “The Great Fire of 1901.” 2019. Accessed 10-24-2022 at: https://www.jaxhistory.org/great-fire-1901/