Savannah’s Great Fire of 1796 was one of the most devastating fires to strike an American city until the nineteenth century.
Only a few years earlier, Savannah and its people had emerged from the years of the American War of Independence, seemingly well poised to capitalize on its growing position as a shipping and mercantile center.
Most of the city’s progress, however, was to be lost overnight.
Besides war, the hazards facing early American cities were many. Probably the two most feared were disease and fire.
Savannah’s officials had long worried about the possibility that the city might one day be consumed in fire. Savannah, like many cities of the time, was constructed almost entirely of intensely flammable wooden frame houses, often packed close together. The risk that the outbreak of a fire, no matter how small, would rapidly spread across much of the city was enormous.
Council took several measures intended to minimize the risk of a serious conflagration. Tentative steps towards the development of a fire service were made. Ordinances were passed forbidding citizens from engaging in various dangerous activities, such as building open fires in enclosed back yards. Plans to sink wells in the Savannah’s several squares were made.
On November 26 1796, the city’s worst fears came true.
Around 6 or 7 in the evening, a small fire broke out in the bakery of a Mr. Gromet on Ellis (then Market) Square. The fire began to spread. Citizens immediately met to try to find some way to contain the fire.
However, though some practical measures had been taken to prevent fire, few strategies were in place to allow rapid response to a developing conflagration. Savannah had had no serious fires for many years; nobody knew what to do.
The time in which the fire might successfully have been fought was soon over. The previous season had been a dry one; two months had passed with little rain.
The wood-built houses of Savannah’s most built up areas were tinder dry, and worse, a light north-north-west breeze, gathering as the flames grew, fanned the first fire and spread sparks and embers onto neighboring properties.
Until around midnight, the fire raged furiously, moving up and along Bay Street from its start point on Ellis Square, reaching almost up to Abercorn Street and from there burning southwards and eastwards across the city until it reached the commons on its sides.
The direction of the wind spared many of the buildings immediately north and west of Market Square, and much of the far eastern portion of the city too was saved by a change of wind direction caused by the intense heat of the burning central city.
By the early hours of the morning, the fire had ceased to spread.
Two to three hundred homes were destroyed, 400 families left homeless. Business places, municipal buildings and churches alike were burned to the ground.
Besides the loss of their houses and property, themselves devastating, many of Savannah’s citizens had also lost the means of their livelihoods. Work premises and tools were burned as well.
The total losses in the great fire were estimated to stand at around $1 million dollars. The burned district covered around two-thirds of the then limits of the city.
Miraculously, only a handful of people were believed to have been killed in the fire. Around half a dozen men, three or four white and two or three black, lost their lives whilst fighting the flames, though it is possible that more deaths went unreported.
The immediate effects of the fire were so severe that the General Assembly intervened to provide for the people’s relief.
The mayor was instructed to write to other cities and states requesting aid and assistance, which was offered in great measure. Almost $40,000 in donations was received, distributed amongst the most needy of Savannah’s newly homeless.
Council also imposed regulations on the price of food and building materials in the time after the fire, to prevent profiteering by unscrupulous merchants.
Chastened by the catastrophic results of its fire, Savannah began to invest greater efforts in fire prevention and fighting measures. It looked to the larger cities of the North for inspiration, roughly modeling a system of fire companies for Savannah on the systems there employed.
Despite these measures, Savannah was not to be freed from the destructive effects of fire. A quarter century later, another fire, every bit as severe as the fire of 1796, struck Savannah again.