Archives for December 2011

The greatest of all the conflagrations that ravaged gold rush San Francisco occurred on May 4, 1851, one year to the day after the second fire, but it actually started an hour before midnight on the evening before at the upholstery store of Baker and Messerver on the south side of Clay Street across from Portsmouth Square. A strong wind blew in from the west and the flames spread rapidly towards the bay. Then the wind shifted, blowing hard from the south, roaring along the planked streets like … [Read more...]

On Friday, June 14th, 1850 at eight in the morning the fire started in a bakery on the east side of Kearny Street between Sacramento and Clay. The wind blew in hard from the west across the city toward the bay, and the flames spread rapidly the two blocks to the water’s edge, then between Montgomery and Sansome. Like the second fire another three hundred buildings were destroyed and again the damage amounted to three or four million dollars. By now it had become all too clear to everyone that … [Read more...]

A little more than four months passed since the first Great Fire in San Francisco when, around four in the morning on Saturday May 4, 1850 at a drinking and gambling house called the United States Exchange, flames broke out again and spread quickly east, north, and west. The fire consumed the entire block bounded by Kearny, Clay, Montgomery and Washington, save for a couple of lucky houses, and moved on to sweep two entire blocks between Montgomery, Washington, Dupont [since renamed Grant] and … [Read more...]

While San Francisco grew at an astonishing rate in the years directly after the discovery of gold, with houses spreading in every direction and populated by people from across the world, there were drawbacks. By the turn of the next century the city was more than fifteen times larger than in 1849 but in all that time there was nothing, until the great earthquake and fire of 1906, to compare with the number of fires that tore through San Francisco from 1849 to 1851. The first fire, … [Read more...]

The quantity of imports that arrived in San Francisco in 1849 was enormous, especially for such a new city, and increased for years afterward. Day after day the vast amount of goods unloaded in Yerba Buena Cove, when coupled with both a lack of storage space and buyers who lacked significant credit, had to be disposed of at once, and for cash. This resulted in a great auction business, not uncommon in those days, and which gave a start to a number of firms that would later become quite large. … [Read more...]