June 11, 1805 was a hot, dry and windy day in Detroit. The city had a population of about 600 people at the time and almost all structures were made of wood. It’s believed that a man knocked ashes from his pipe that were taken by the wind and blown into piles of dry hay and straw.
Fire quickly spread. Detroiters formed lines to pass buckets of water to dump on them, but the strong winds fanned and spread the flames. Within six hours, the city was almost completely destroyed. The only buildings still standing were a fort on a hill that overlooked the city and a warehouse on the Detroit River.
More than 100 years of growth were erased.
No one died. Newspapers at the time credit this to the fact that the fire started on a sunny morning — people were awake and already active when the flames spread.
“The rapidity of the destruction was perhaps unprecedented, but will not appear surprising to anyone previously acquainted with the place. The buildings were mostly old, all of wood, and dry as tinder and extremely crowded together,” read a newspaper account from the time.
