3/26/2023 0 Comments Bulb boy theory![]() It is highly unlikely that we will ever have definitive knowledge of the cause of the fire. ![]() Bales bases his argument on an exhaustive review of property records and the post-fire inquiry. Bales, writing in The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of O'Leary's Cow, contends (as some others did in 1871 and in later years) that an O'Leary neighbor named Daniel Sullivan accidentally sparked the blaze. A meteor split into pieces as it fell to earth October 8, setting off the simultaneous catastrophic fires in Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin, plus a lesser conflagration in Michigan. Some boys were sneaking a smoke or gambling in the barn. Several additional theories surfaced at the time of the fire and since. (The Chicago History Museum has in its collections a few cowbells that were also supposedly discovered on the site of the barn after the fire.) As for the lamp itself, he said that he couldn't produce it because an Irish servant, as part of a cover-up, "borrowed" it and then disappeared. A person who years later claimed that as a boy he found the broken lamp under some floorboards and took it home never explained how, if the barn had floorboards, they made it through the inferno. Those who heard her "confess" presented conflicting versions of why she said she was in the barn. Kate O'Leary offered sworn testimony that she was in bed when the fire started, and the official inquiry concluded that it found no proof of her guilt. O'Leary and her benighted cow-named Daisy, Madeline, and Gwendolyn in assorted retellings-were innocent. A few curiosity-seekers claimed to find the broken pieces of such a lantern while snooping behind her cottage, whose escape from destruction was one of the ironies of the disaster.īut there are plenty of reasons to think that Mrs. There was a rumor that Kate admitted to different people right after the blaze began that she was in the barn when one of her cows kicked over a lantern. ![]() She and her husband Patrick had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay for the winter-and to feed the flames when the barn took fire. She also owned a horse that pulled the wagon, as well as a calf. The conflagration almost surely began in the vicinity of the crowded barn, where Kate O'Leary kept the five cows she milked twice a day in order to help support the five O'Leary children. O'Leary's cow start the Great Chicago Fire? ![]()
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