The night of 8 October 1871 produced one of the most extraordinary clusters of simultaneous American disasters in the historical record. The Great Chicago Fire destroyed the centre of Chicago, killing approximately 300 people and leaving 100,000 homeless. The Peshtigo Fire burned approximately 1.5 million acres of Wisconsin forest and killed approximately 1,200 to 2,400 people, the deadliest wildfire in American history. A third major fire — substantially less well known than either — burned the Door Peninsula on the eastern shore of Green Bay the same night and killed approximately 150 people.
The Door Peninsula fire was substantively erased from American historical memory by the simultaneous larger events.
What it was
The Door Peninsula in 1871 was substantially newly settled. The eastern Wisconsin pinewoods had been opened to homesteading in the 1850s and 1860s; the principal settler population was Belgian and Luxembourgish Catholic immigrants who had arrived in successive waves between 1853 and 1870 and had cleared farms in the dense second-growth woods. The two principal settler communities were the small towns of Williamsonville and Brussels (the latter named for the Belgian-American character of the population).
The fire conditions on 8 October 1871 were substantively the same that produced the simultaneous Peshtigo conflagration. An exceptionally hot and dry summer (the 1871 northern Wisconsin growing season had been the driest on record) combined with unburned slash accumulated from years of settler land-clearing burns combined with a low-pressure system that produced 40+ mph westerly winds on the evening of 8 October. The fire conditions across the entire upper Midwest that night were anomalous in a way modern wildfire meteorology has struggled to model.
What happened
The Door Peninsula fire appears to have started as an independent ignition rather than as a spread from the Peshtigo fire across the intervening waters of Green Bay. The 1871 settler-period land-clearing burns had been numerous through the previous month; any one of dozens of smouldering brush piles could have been the point of ignition under the 8 October wind conditions.
The Williamsonville disaster was the worst. The townspeople — perhaps 100 settlers — had gathered in the central clearing of the village to fight the advancing wall of flame. The fire overran the clearing in approximately five minutes. Approximately 60 people died at Williamsonville; the remaining 40 survived by lying in a shallow potato cellar through the worst of the firestorm.
The Brussels community fared somewhat better. Father Peter Pernin — the Belgian-American Catholic priest of the Peshtigo parish and substantively the principal survivor-chronicler of the larger Peshtigo disaster — had pastoral responsibility for the Brussels community as well. His subsequent memoir is the principal documentary source for the Door Peninsula events. Approximately 50 people died across the Brussels-Williamsonville-Forestville settlement zone outside Williamsonville itself.
Why nobody remembers
The Door Peninsula deaths were absorbed into the Peshtigo death toll in the earliest Wisconsin newspaper coverage of the disaster. The state-level investigation of October-November 1871 treated the three-county fire complex (Peshtigo, the Brown County fires, and the Door Peninsula) as a single event. The Door Peninsula deaths were recorded in the Peshtigo death registers; the separate Door Peninsula identity was lost in the single Peshtigo numerical aggregate.
The 1881 Michigan Thumb Fire — the later major Great Lakes settler-region firestorm — produced a federal investigation that substantively codified the 1871 events as the founding precedents of American forest-fire policy. The Door Peninsula component of the 1871 cluster has substantively only recently been separately re-recognised by the Wisconsin state historical-society reconstruction work of the 1990s and 2000s.