Daisy the cow almost certainly did not start the Great Chicago Fire.
But that has not stopped as many as 50 people per week from calling a Chicago real estate agent; they are curious about a mansion he is selling that he says was built for Catherine O’Leary, the troublemaking cow’s owner.
The language in the listing for the 6,270-square-foot, four-story Englewood mansion at 726 W. Garfield Blvd. does not exactly lend itself to myth debunking: “THE FAMOUS O’LEARY MANSION!” the description of the $535,770 property proclaims. “JAMES O’LEARY HAD THIS MANSION BUILT FOR HIS MOTHER CATHERINE O’LEARY WHOSE COW ALLEGEDLY STARTED THE CHICAGO FIRE.”
The 12-bed, 5 1/2-bath property has original woodwork and coffered ceilings, though the agent, Jose Villaseñor, told Block Club Chicago that the interior would need considerable upgrades. And in a strange twist, given the family’s history, the mansion has what may be the city’s only fire hydrant dedicated to a single home, Villaseñor told realtor.com.
But did Mrs. O’Leary actually live there?
Experts say that, much like the myth of her cow’s fateful lantern kick, her connection to the home is also dubious.
An obituary for O’Leary places her at a nearby home on South Halsted Street, and census records show that her son probably did not live at the West Garfield Boulevard home until after his mother had died.
Villaseñor, of Realty of Chicago, did not return phone calls or emails Wednesday or Thursday seeking insight into how he knew that O’Leary’s son had built the house for her or if and when she lived at the home.
Here’s how the legend began.
Carl Smith, author of “Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City,” said it was “virtually positive” that the fire that destroyed more than 2,000 acres of Chicago started in or around the O’Leary barn on the night of Oct. 8, 1871. The blaze killed approximately 300 people, left 100,000 people — one-third of the city’s population — homeless and caused $200 million worth of property damage.
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But, he said, all indications are that O’Leary and her family were in bed when the fire broke out. Experts agree that the legend of a cow kicking over a lantern midmilking and setting an entire city ablaze is almost certainly fiction, though no one can say as much with any definitiveness because the official inquiry into the fire was never able to determine the cause.
Historians point to a number of obvious problems with the cow story: If a cow had, in fact, kicked over a lantern while O’Leary was milking it, why would she leave the barn and go back inside after the fire broke out? Why wouldn’t she scream for help? Why wouldn’t she try to save her cows or the barn?
So where did the cow story come from?
Ann Durkin Keating, a history professor at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, who specializes in Chicago history, said the cow story caught on because of anti-Irish and anti-immigrant sentiment — and it all started with a rogue reporter.
More than 20 years after the fire, Michael Ahern, who at the time was a reporter for The Chicago Republican, admitted that he had concocted the cow tale because it made for a better story. His story had not implicated O’Leary by name, but Keating said she — an Irish immigrant — was an all-too-convenient scapegoat.
“Within 48 hours, they’re blaming the O’Learys for this,” Keating said. “Mrs. O’Leary in particular. They were looking for a scapegoat, and she was Irish and a woman.”
Newspapers published caricatures depicting O’Leary as bumbling, ignorant and, in one case, a “drunken old hag.” They leaned on ethnic stereotypes as they lampooned the stupidity of the “old Irish woman” who “swore she would be revenged on a city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon.”
(That the O’Leary home survived the fire while much of the rest of the neighborhood burned did not exactly help matters, Keating said.
In 1997, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution that exonerated O’Leary and her cow. But it was far too late for O’Leary, who never allowed herself to be photographed and who, according to her physician, bore the weight of blame and notoriety until she died in 1895.
“That she is regarded as the cause, even accidentally, of the Great Chicago Fire is the grief of her life,” he told the press in 1894.
At first, it may seem odd that this particular fire — and O’Leary and her cow — have attained cultlike status in the American consciousness. The Great Chicago Fire was not even the worst fire that occurred on that night in 1871: Some 250 miles away, one of the worst fires in American history killed about 1,500 people in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.
But the Chicago fire was a devastating blow to a city on the rise, Keating said.
“It was a big story that reverberated around the world,” she said. “It gutted the downtown business district, and in that way it was a big disaster, even though there was not nearly as much loss of life.”
And the memorable cow myth, she said, gives it staying power. “No question, we do like a good story,” she said.
So, was the mansion built for O’Leary?
According to experts, there is about as much evidence for Villaseñor’s claim as there was against the cow.
Everything points to the fact that O’Leary lived elsewhere: her obituary, census records, the sheer improbability that her son would have been able to afford to buy the West Garfield Boulevard home for her at such a young age.
Smith said that O’Leary’s son, James Patrick O’Leary, known as Big Jim, was a notorious gambling kingpin and that he may have had the financial means for such an extravagant purchase — but probably not in 1890, when the property listing claims he built the home for his mother.
Smith said James O’Leary would have been awfully young — age 21 or 22 — to have bought a house that grand for his mother.
Another obstacle: The 1900 census, published five years after Catherine O’Leary’s death, lists a James P. O’Leary as living at an address on South Halsted Street, about four blocks from the West Garfield Boulevard home. The Englewood mansion is not associated with him until the 1920 census. His mother’s obituary also places her at the South Halsted Street address.
All of which suggests, Smith said, that the claim that O’Leary’s son built the Englewood mansion for her — or that she ever lived there — is yet another addition to the lore surrounding the Great Chicago Fire.
“I can’t rule it out, but nothing points to it,” he said. “And I don’t think you nor I are ready to trust real estate agents as historians.”
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