Hi friends and family,
I did some small editing of this story and thought about doing some major edits like moving paragraphs around, but decided to keep the story as it is. All of dad’s stories read like he spoke. This one tends to ramble a little. A paragraph near the end could be moved near the top but, I think, shows a ‘stream of consciousness’ that demonstrates dad’s way of thinking. This story also shows again, dad’s love of history with a dramatic telling of a forgotten period of Michigan’s history. He ends it with a bit of warning to the present day . . . I hope you enjoy the story as it is.
I’m sorry that I did not post a “Don Tschirhart” story last weekend but did not feel up to much of anything except working around the yard after news of yet another mass shooting at yet another school. I spent some time making known my hurt and anger that practically nothing has been done since the last school shooting, using Facebook as a platform. My replies to posts by others reciting ‘statistics’ and claiming “fake news” and not one of them willing to make a small sacrifice to help save our children from being sacrificed were becoming cruel. I even replied to one person that there are some who will write the opposite of what you say no matter what you say. “The sky is up”, I wrote. That was cruel, I know but, kind of funny/true . . . So, I had to stop before alienating many family and friends who apparently are worried that our country could become something the movies and sensationalist tabloids and cable channel(s) warn about.
I’m pretty sure dad would have had something ‘strong’ and not necessarily popular to say about this, and that’s what motivates me to write these words. Thanks dad, for setting an example about standing up for your beliefs and standing by your words. We could use more persons like you.
Thanks for reading,
Love to friends and family,
David T
p.s. Comments are very much appreciated.You can write comments below each story.
“Fire Once Devastated Thumb”
By Don Tschirhart
Excerpted from the unpublished book “It’s a Wonderful World II: A Retired Reporter Looks At Life“
Fire Once Devastated Thumb
It was an extremely hot, dry, windy afternoon on October 8, 1871, in Michigan’s Thumb Area.
Farmer Charles Lamp heard a loud crack, looked up and saw a wall of flames and smoke approaching his home.
Hitching up horses to a wagon he boarded his wife and four children and tried to escape.
The fire caught up with them. All were killed except Lamp who was horribly burned.
The Lamp family were among 50 death casualties of the 1871 fire that raced across the Thumb Area on that dry October 8 and 9 beginning near Saginaw Bay and ending at the Lake Huron shoreline.
At one farm a family was found at the bottom of a well where the farmer thought mistakenly they might be safe.
“The fire was flying through the air like a shower of hail,” said one report. Many villages including White Rock, a few miles north of Forestville were “enveloped in a sheet of flames.” Towns as far north as Huron City and Sand Beach on Lake Huron were wiped out.
Persons living near the Lake Huron shore in White Lake and Forestville waded into the lake surviving the scorching air only by plunging into the cold water. They watched the fire eat up their homes, fences, barns, stock, furniture, clothing and important papers.
Wet, exhausted and shivering survivors crawled from the water some into rescue boats sent the next morning from towns further south. Tens of thousands of people were homeless.
A decade later, months of rainless heat made Sept. 8, 1881, a scorcher. A wind was building from the southwest.
Maryia Weitzel and her six children saw the smoke coming toward them and fled toward the home of her brother, George Kroetsch.
As they struggled with flying firebrands that ignited the woods around them. Maryia sent a son ahead. Her brother, George, came to help, but was too late. Searchers found the Weitzel family and George where they perished.
As the fire approached the Hagen family near Ubly, Robert Hagen took his family into a root cellar dug into the side of a hill, put bedding on the floor and 11 people crammed into it and remained all night.
Hagen’s cows ran to the Cass River and laid down in the water near the Dunlop family.
My next-door neighbor, Ken, said his grandfather’s uncle, a farmer, heard the wild-fire was coming. Using a horse-drawn plow, he plowed a large area circling his house, stored water to put out embers and waited with his family for the fire to skip his house. His home was undamaged. Other farms nearby were destroyed.
The 1881 fire, believed started near southern Saginaw Bay, was fanned by 40-mile-an-hour winds and raced through the Thumb Area northward, wiping out villages as far as Pointe Aux Barques, killing 300 persons and seriously injuring hundreds of others.
The holocaust claimed thousands of acres of forest land bringing to an end a lucrative lumbering operation and led to the sale of land in small parcels.
Last fall, my wife, Margie, and I drove north on M-53 (Van Dyke) through the heart of Michigan’s Thumb to Port Austin and then took the coast road south through picturesque small towns to Port Huron where we had dinner before returning home.
It wasn’t until I talked with Evelyn, my 87-year-old friend who walks with me occasionally at the Lapeer Community Center, that I was reminded we had driven through one of Michigan’s most historically tragic areas.
As usual my curiosity got the better of me. I began my quest for information at the Ruth Hughes Library in Imlay City.
Two books describe the disasters, one written by an old friend, the late Jim Lincoln, a former Detroit City Councilman and Wayne County Juvenile Court judge, who grew up in Harbor Beach near where my grandfather was born.
Many stories of the fires were told in the books and as I read them my mind remembered the areas that Margie and I had driven through:
Bad Axe, Kinde, Port Austin, Huron City, Sand Beach, Parisville, Ubly, Harbor Beach, White Rock, Forestville, Richardville and Sanilac.
“Boy,” I thought. “A hundred and twenty-five years ago this area was just a blackened shell.”
It was hard to imagine that the prosperous fields of corn, sugar beet and beans were once a forest and small farms.
The cause: Stupidity of people burning ground cover and trees during an extremely long, dry, windy and hot weather period.
One thing about this world: There’s no end to unthinking stupidity.
Don Tschirhart
