Baker Sets Village Ablaze in Great Fire of 1891

Boyd Broth­ers, Main Street look­ing northwest

The sum­mer of 1891 in Glen Ellyn was espe­cially hot and dry. The drought per­sisted into the autumn. Old timers likened it to the weather 20 years ear­lier that had pre­ceded the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which burned for two days and con­sumed every­thing in a path nearly a mile wide and four miles long.

John Elick, a local baker, had the job of light­ing the kerosene street lamps along Main Street in Glen Ellyn. On the evening of Novem­ber 6, 1891, as Elick lit the lamp in front of his bak­ery, it slipped from his grasp and crashed in flames on the wooden side­walk. Within sec­onds the blaze was beyond what could be smoth­ered with over­coats or a nearby bucket of water, and it quickly spread to Elick’s own build­ing, a wood-frame store front.

A gen­eral alarm was sounded, but there was lit­tle the towns­peo­ple could do. In those days, Glen Ellyn had no fire com­pany of its own. A rider was dis­patched to Wheaton two miles away, and the Wheaton Hook and Lad­der Com­pany responded as promptly as horses could pull the equip­ment. By the time they arrived, the fire was com­pletely out of con­trol. Fur­ther­more, Glen Ellyn had no munic­i­pal water sys­tem to sup­ply water for fight­ing the fire.

The fire started on the west side of Main Street, one build­ing north of Cres­cent Boule­vard. As was the case with the Great Chicago Fire, strong southerly winds pushed the fire north–toward Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue. Boyd Broth­ers Hard­ware Store was the next vic­tim, fol­lowed by the office build­ing of George M.H. Wag­ner, the drug­store of W.S. Ryder, the gro­cery store of John Mertz, and the W.H. Myers Meat Mar­ket. The fire burned all night until it had con­sumed every build­ing on the west side of Main except for one just south of where the fire started.

Prac­ti­cally every­one in town turned out to help, but their efforts were lim­ited to remov­ing mer­chan­dise and fix­tures from the build­ings in the path of the blaze and dous­ing sparks car­ried by the wind to busi­nesses across the street. While the build­ings on the east side of Main were spared destruc­tion, sev­eral suf­fered blis­tered paint and charred wood.

The Glen Ellyn fire of 1891 didn’t make head­lines around the coun­try the way the Chicago fire had 20 years ear­lier, but pro­por­tion­ally it destroyed as large a por­tion of this com­mu­nity as the Chicago fire did for Chicago. And, like Chicago, Glen Ellyn imme­di­ately set about to replace the wood build­ings in its cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict with masonry struc­tures, many of which still stand today.