(ILLINOIS) Ober Carrie E Letter on the Great Chicago Fire an

Sale 2517 - Lot 110

Price Realized: $ 1,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750

(ILLINOIS.) Ober, Carrie E. Letter on the Great Chicago Fire and the simultaneous fires across Lake Michigan. Autograph Letter Signed to Cousin Isa. 4 pages, 8 x 5 inches, on one folding sheet; minor soiling, unrelated pencil calculations at the head of page one. Three Oaks, MI, 14 October 1871

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"Everyone is tired out fighting fires. . . . We are having terrible fires out here. The fire in Chicago was awful. How many many suffered and were burned it will be hard to find out. It will never be known for certain. Thursday they took one hundred and eighty bodies out of the Sherman house, many of them burned to a coal. That is only one house out of many. A friend of mine from here was a teacher there. She gave a boy five dollars to carry her trunk a mile. He said he could not afford to carry it any farther. She tied a rope to it . . . put it over her shoulder and dragged it a mile farther herself. . . . Last Monday we had a fire about half a mile from us. It burned about two hundred acres. Most of the men in town and round in the country have been fighting fires all the week. . . . I packed up our clothing when it got so near us. . . . In Chicago two thousand two hundred acres were burned. The thieves are plundering and when caught at it, are shot or hung up to a lamp post."