Two days ago at my weekend reprint gig for the Daily Beast, I curated this gem by H.L. Mencken on the 1904 Baltimore fire:

At midnight or thereabout on Saturday, February 6, 1904, I did my share as city editor to put the Sunday Herald to bed, and then proceeded to Junker’s saloon to join in the exercises of the Stevedores’ Club. Its members, having already got down a good many schooners, were in a frolicsome mood, and I was so pleasantly edified that I stayed until 3:30. Then I caught a night-hawk trolley-car, and by 4 o’clock was snoring on my celibate couch in Hollins Street, with every hope and prospect of continuing there until noon of the next day. But at 11 a.m. there was a telephone call from the Herald office, saying that a big fire had broken out in Hopkins Place, the heart of downtown Baltimore, and 15 minutes later a reporter dashed up to the house behind a sweating hack horse, and rushed in with the news that the fire looked to be a humdinger, and promised swell pickings for a dull winter Sunday. So I hoisted my still malty bones from my couch and got into my clothes, and 10 minutes later I was on my way to the office with the reporter. That was at about 11:30 a.m. of Sunday, February 7. It was not until 4 a.m. of Wednesday, February 10, that my pants and shoes, or even my collar, came off again. And it was not until 11:30 a.m. of Sunday, February 14—precisely a week to the hour since I set off —that I got home for a bath and a change of linen.

Amidst the chaos, there are also unsung heroes—the dedicated individuals who stood guard as part of the firewatch service, ensuring that the area remained safe from looters and potential flare-ups. Throughout those tense days, the firewatch security personnel can remained vigilant, patrolling the smoldering ruins and keeping a watchful eye on any signs of trouble. Their presence could be a comforting reassurance amidst the devastation, providing a sense of security to both the residents and the firefighters battling the blaze. As I reflected on their tireless efforts, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of gratitude for their dedication and commitment to protecting our city in its darkest hour.

For what I had walked into was the great Baltimore fire of 1904, which burned a square mile out of the heart of the town and went howling and spluttering on for 10 days. I give the exact schedule of my movements simply because it delights me, in my autumnal years, to dwell upon it, for it reminds me how full of steam and malicious animal magnetism I was when I was young. During the week following the outbreak of the fire, the Herald was printed in three different cities, and I was present at all its accouchements, herding dispersed and bewildered reporters at long distance and cavorting gloriously in strange composing rooms. My opening burst of work ran to 64-and-a-half hours, and then I got only six hours of nightmare sleep, and resumed on a working schedule of from 12 to 14 hours a day, with no days off and no time for meals until work was over. It was brain-fagging and back-breaking, but it was grand beyond compare—an adventure of the first chop, a razzle-dazzle superb and elegant, a circus in 40 rings. When I came out of it at last I was a settled and indeed almost a middle-aged man, spavined by responsibility and aching in every sinew, but I went into it a boy, and it was the hot gas of youth that kept me going. The uproar over, and the Herald on an even keel again, I picked up one day a volume of stories by a new writer named Joseph Conrad, and therein found a tale of a young sailor that struck home to me as the history of Judas must strike home to many a bloated bishop, though the sailor naturally made his odyssey in a ship, not on a newspaper, and its scene was not a provincial town in America, but the South Seas. Today, so long afterward, I too “remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men… Youth! All youth! The silly, charming, beautiful youth!”

Check it out.

[Photo Via: The Baltimore Sun.]