Baltimore, MD The Great Fire, Feb 1904

WHOLE BLOCKS IN RUINS

Conflagration at Baltimore Beyond Control of Firemen

LOSS ALREADY $100,000,000.

Fire Which Started In Heart of Business Section of the City Spread With Fearful Rapidity, Reducing Some of the Finest Buildings In the Country to Ruins---Explosions Add to Terror of the Scene.

Baltimore, Feb. 3,---The business section of the city, comprising some of the finest buildings in America, is in ruins. The loss will exceed $100,000,000. The awful conflagration, which has raged since 11 o'clock Sunday morning, is still beyond control. Nothing like it has been witnessed in this country since the great Chicago fire.

Business blocks, hotels, and public buildings have been wiped out by the score. Dozens have been blown up by dynamite to stay the flames. A pall of smoke and cinders covers the whole city.

The postoffice building is now burning, also the $4,500,000 court house. The Holliday street theatre has been blown up with dynamite and the United States Express offices and central office of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad are burned. Both The Sun building and The American, directly across the street, have been dynamited.

The entire staff of the Baltimore Sun was transferred to Washington and that paper will be issued by the use of the plant of The Evening Star. Estimates of the area burned, made by The Sun staff, place it at between 25 and 30 blocks, all of which is the business section of the city.

The fire broke out shortly before 11 o'clock in the morning in the wholesale dry goods store of John E. Burst & Co. on Hopkins place, in the heart of the business district, with a series of loud explosions which were heard in the remote parts of the city, and spread with fearful rapidity.

In a half hour there were a dozen big warehouses in the wholesale dry goods and notions district burning fiercely. The entire city fire department was called out, but was utterly powerless to check the spread of the flames, which were aided by high winds, and by noon there were savage fires in at least [illegible] big warehouses and the conflagration was steadily eating its way into blocks east, west and south. Building after building fell a prey to the flames, and apparently there was no check to the onward sweep of destruction.

On Baltimore street the block between Liberty and Sharp was soon ablaze, then came the next block east to Hanover, and after that the block on the south side to Charles street broke out into flames, the [illegible] company's building and Oehm's Acme hall burning fiercely.

Meanwhile there were stores north of Baltimore street being similarly consumed. Mullin's hotel caught and other buildings near it West of Liberty street, on the south side of Baltimore, the block was doomed, and the big Baltimore Bargain House also caught.

Down in Hopkins place, where the conflagration started, Hurst's building and the other wholesale houses on both sides of the street crumbled and fell.

The big dry goods houses of Daniel Miller & Sons, and R. M. Sutton & Co were soon aflame, and along German east and west from the Hurst building, there were a dozen buildings burning and scores more threatened. The spectacle of ruin and destruction from any point in these doomed blocks was something appalling.

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