The exhibit opens Friday at the Chicago History Museum.
A bird’s-eye view of a city ablaze, ropy flames crackling against the night sky from every window and doorway. That’s the image many have of the Great Chicago Fire — that, and a clumsy cow knocking over a lantern in Mrs. O’Leary’s shed. The Chicago History Museum’s “City on Fire: Chicago 1871,” opening Friday, offers the wide-angle images of a blaze that destroyed some 200,000 buildings, but it also encourages a closer, more personal look on the 150th anniversary. “Dear Chum…,” begins a letter written in fountain pen by 12-year-old Justin Butterfield, describing, apparently to a friend, his family’s frantic escape from the blaze. Butterfield describes evacuating and loading up what they can — two trunks — into a wheelbarrow.
