This is an I-Heart podcast.

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This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,

and we tell a lot of stories about our nation's past.

And this one next, well, it's a story, well, part of a story that you know, the Great Chicago

Fire of 1871, but the more interesting story, which is the Great Chicago Recovery.

Experts agree on where that fire started back in 1871, a little under two miles from downtown Chicago, just to the southwest.

But how it started remains an open question.

And so we bring you Tim Samuelson, the cultural historian of the city of Chicago, to tell us about this area and dive into the mythology of how the

Chicago fire got started. It was an area of small shacks and cottages of largely Irish immigrants.

The fire itself began in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. For the scale of Mrs. O'Leary and her

existence in the neighborhood, she was an entrepreneurial businesswoman. There was more than

one cow in the barn, and she had a modest but substantial business.

And of course, the thing that's amazing is that for years people told this story about

her at night, milking the cow, the cow kicking over a lantern, setting the barn of fire, and then high winds and dry conditions go and burn down a significant part of the city.

Well, if you have a dairy business, you don't milk your cows at night.

In fact, usually at the time the fire started and we're talking about, oh, maybe about

a quarter to nine in the evening, you're likely asleep in your house because you have to get

up early to milk those cows. And again, there's multiple cows in the barn. So it makes for kind of an interesting, ironic thing that poor Mrs. O'Leary gets fingered.

But where did the fire start?

You bet it started in their barn.

And ironically, what didn't burn in the Great Chicago Fire?

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