Remember our a&& kicker, Sarah Horton Cockrell? And her St. Nicholas hotel that only stood for a year before it burnt to the ground along with the rest of Dallas? Here is the story behind the massive 1860 fire in Dallas.
Roughly 700 people lived in Dallas in 1860 with more than 90 of them being black. (The Civil War will begin in nine months.) On the day of the fire, July 8th, it is thought that temperatures reached 110 degrees F. Add to this volatile mix the utter lack of a fire department – not even a volunteer one. Dallas would not get a bucket brigade until 1872.
With our small town made almost entirely of wood, with no fire department and racial tensions at an all time high, fire broke out. Every single commercial building in Dallas would burn to the ground, save one – and that one survived by sheer luck. Businesses lost their buildings and their stock. Coincidentally, there were several other fires in north Texas towns (Denton and Pilot Point being major centers that also burned at the time).
Slave revolts were immediately blamed. But, was that the true cause of the fires? Stay tuned.
Want to see where the first fire department in Dallas was located, before it burned to the ground? Book a tour.
Image: Taken from Flashback Dallas website. This is a photo from 1964, debating where to put the JFK memorial. As the photo is oriented, the location would ultimately be the block to the left of the “Main Street” sticker – not to the right as it is proposed in the photo. Sarah Cockrell’s hotel would have still stood just out of frame to the left, although the name had changed many times by 1964.
