However, on a scorching hot summer day in July of 1874, Chicago experienced its second major fire in three years. On July 14, the fire started near the northeast corner of Clark and 12th Street (now Roosevelt), less than a mile east of where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started on Dekoven and Jefferson Streets. Over the span of 8 hours, the fire burned more than 47 acres, destroying more than 800 buildings and killing 20 people. Eighty-five percent of Black-owned property in the city burned, including John and Mary Jane Richardson-Jones’ home, according to Dempsey Travis’ book “An Autobiography of Black Chicago.”
In 1870, there were more than 3,600 Black people in Chicago, and the population grew to more than 14,000 by 1890, according to Dr. Christopher Robert Reed’s “Black Chicago’s First Century, Volume I: 1833-1900.” The 1874 fire became known as the Second Chicago Fire. Coupled with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, it shaped the trajectory of Black Chicago through the formation of the Black Belt and the population growth that followed.
“You start seeing the dispersal of these African Americans further south, and to the west, and that’s one of the first ways that we see some of the racialized enclaves that we would come to know later begin to form,” said Julius Jones, an assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum. Jones is developing an exhibit, “City on Fire,” which will premiere on Oct. 8, which will be the 150th anniversary of the 1871 fire.