On July 4, 1866, a boy threw a firecracker into a pile of wood shavings at a boat shop on Commercial Street in Portland. When the fire was out, all of the buildings on almost 30 streets on the Portland Peninsula were destroyed, and two people were dead.

William Daicy, an active Portland firefighter, and Don Whitney, a retired Portland fire lieutenant, tell the story of that fire in “Portland’s Great Conflagration: The 1866 Fire Disaster.”

The 142-page book, published by The History Press out of Charleston, S.C, and costing $19.99, includes a brief history of the Portland Fire Department, many photographs taken of equipment before and immediately following the fire, and complete details from descriptions of the disaster in logbooks kept at the Portland Fire Museum.

Daicy, who has been a Portland Fire Department historian since 1989, and Whitney, who teaches firefighting courses at Southern Maine Community College, have created a fascinating book.

We recently spoke with Daicy about their collaboration. 

Q: How did the two of you pair up to write the book?

A: Don and I are both firemen. I’m active and joined in 1982, and he is retired. We both have that love for the history of the Portland Fire Department, and over the years have done untold number of hours doing research and documenting things at the museum.

So this was kind of a tag-team match. The publisher contacted me first and asked if I wanted to do a book on the July 4, 1866, fire, and I told them I didn’t think so, that I had a lot of research I wanted to do and was working, so I gave this person Don Whitney’s number. And then half an hour later, Don called me and said he didn’t want to do it by himself, but if I wanted, we could do it together.

Don has written four other books. He was the main pen-and-paper man. A lot of it was based on research that we have done over the years in the department and down at the fire museum. The fire museum has a lot of logbooks by eye witnesses in their own handwriting on the following day.

My main job was doing the photos and the research on the logbooks, and Don put the fingers to work and then checked with me. We had to agree on every word. 

Q: I’d read some about the fire in the past, but what I really enjoyed in your book was the history of the department before the fire, and pieces about the equipment and why the leather hoses were a certain size.

A: It’s a very brief history. We wanted to lay the groundwork for what happened so people would understand what happened that day. There was a lot of talk about the department being untrained, and the history shows that not to be true. 

Q: You mentioned the photos taken by people coming up from Boston. They are really something.

A: We have had those photos on the walls down at the museum, and we have just had them rephotographed and cleaned up after all of those years, and they now are clear as a bell. You really should come down and look at them full-size, not just the size of the book. 

Q: Toward the end of the book, you are kind of critical of some of the cuts that have been made in the current Portland Fire Department. Why is that?

A: We get asked all the time down at the museum if this could happen again, and taking into consideration the current force and the things they had to face that day, the answer has to be yes. After the fire, one of the firefighters said that the only way that fire could have been stopped would have been to have a steam pumper at full ahead right at the spot that it started.

We believe that it could happen again, and that is the opinion of two firefighters. There are still a lot of wood-frame buildings very close together, all over the city, and that is a danger. 

Q: But in some ways the city was made better by the fire, wasn’t it?

A: Oh, yes. I found a paper written shortly after saying that Exchange Street had been widened a lot after the fire. Have you been to Exchange Street? It’s not very wide, so imagine how wide it was before the fire.

Portland became a modern city after the fire, with more buildings made of brick and granite rather than wood shingles. 

Q: Anything else you’d like to say?

A: Our main reason for writing this book was to set the record straight about the department. There were reports that the department was untrained, that the department was away on a picnic — that was disproved by John Neal (1793-1876, an editor, novelist and often described as America’s first art critic) right after the fire, but the rumor persisted.

We told this based on the accounts from firefighters saying what happened, that they were hampered by the fact that the city didn’t have a hydrant system. That was added after the fire. They didn’t have a fire alarm system. That came after. The fire department didn’t have its own horses; they came from Public Works. We have documents at the museum, after they got their horses, on how they were trained.

We have reports of a fire leaping over one engine, and how the glass of one lantern on an engine was melted by the fire. These man fighting the fire didn’t run off, and many of them lost their own property in the fire. 

Tom Atwell can be contacted at 791-6362 or at:

tatwell@pressherald.com

 

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