Hemmed In By Fire

Jerry Banik, November 2022

“Whiting/Robertsdale” and “prairie fires” are words that don’t seem to belong in the same sentence today, but a hundred and twenty five years ago it was a different story.

The brand new town of Whiting had been growing quickly and steadily since Standard Oil arrived in 1889.  While the 1890 census recorded only two hundred Whiting residents, by 1897 roughly three thousand souls called Whiting home. Wooden houses and wooden sidewalks had appeared on its new, mostly dirt streets.  The town itself, having just incorporated two years earlier, was still surrounded by prairie grass, marsh grass, shrub oak, brush and weeds, which also filled its empty lots. Steam locomotives powered by coal fires chugged through town, past the new refinery with its giant tanks full of oil and kerosene.

In the late summer of 1897, northern Indiana found itself in a crippling drought.  No rainfall for weeks made Whiting and Robertsdale one big tinderbox, where errant sparks or carelessly tossed cigarettes quickly started brush fires.  Back then, firefighting here was an entirely voluntary effort; it would be more than a decade before Whiting had a fire department staffed by city employees.  Townspeople organized into ad hoc fire brigades. 

The drought was the final ingredient in the recipe for a disaster that ended up being only narrowly avoided.

By the first week in September, newspapers reported prairie fires burning at many points in the open country around South Chicago, Roby, Hammond and Whiting.  One fire, reportedly started by a spark from a passing locomotive, lit up the parched prairie to the east of the Forsythe Racetrack, the second of the three horse racing tracks built by the Roby Racing Association.  Volunteer firefighters had already responded to nearby grass fires twice that week, and the Whiting Sun reported that about a dozen volunteers, some of them just boys, were the first on the scene.  The racetrack’s flames spread to a two-story, one hundred stall horse stable, destroying it, and also damaged a second stable and the wooden fence around the property.  Heavy smoke and flames panicked the race horses inside, and they were only removed at great risk and with considerable difficulty.  After handling this fire, the volunteers would be called upon yet again, the same day.

By the time the Forsythe Racetrack fire was controlled, another grass fire had flared up to the west of the Roby Racetrack on the state line.  Track employees struggled mightily to keep it from reaching Roby’s stables, eventually diverting it toward the south. 

The new Hammond, Whiting and East Chicago Electric Railway, our local streetcar system, ran through town in those days. From the east, it came up Indianapolis Boulevard (then just known as Indiana Boulevard), and swung north on Schrage Avenue to 119th Street, where it turned west until it again reached the Boulevard, and on to Chicago. Fierce fires sprang up all along the line, and encroaching flames terrified passengers. At a number of points flames burned right up to the rails and set the ties on fire before the locals were able to fight them back.

In Whiting, fires were burning all around town.  No sooner would flames be extinguished in one spot than they would break out in another.  Strong winds fanned the flames, putting lives and property in great danger. Some residents found themselves fighting fires all night long to save their homes.  Residents of the area we today know as Goose Island called for help as flames approached, and the fire was kept back from the houses.  Still, as in neighboring areas, residents suffered considerably from the heavy smoke. Many Standard Oil men continuously battled flareups, doing everything they could to keep the flames from reaching the refinery.  They ripped up and removed as much vegetation around the plant as possible, and, much as would be done decades later in the big refinery fire of 1955, encircled its storage tanks with sand dikes.

At Stieglitz Park the fires were brief, but particularly ferocious.  Some of Stieglitz’ wooden sidewalks were destroyed, and it was only with intense and determined effort that its homes were spared.  From Roby to Indiana Harbor people tried to remove all the vegetation from empty lots.  Broad tracks were plowed into the prairie to create firebreaks in hopes of keeping the burning grasses there from torching the settled properties.

The entire population of Whiting was said to be struggling from the effects of the heavy smoke by the time the drought finally broke and the wildfires ended.