In this post, I am going to examine the fires listed as having occurred in the years between 1840 and 1850.
I believe that a new historical timeline, grafted onto the existing physical infrastructure, was officially kicked off by Exposition in London’s Crystal Palace in 1851…
…after taking approximately 110-years to dig enough infrastructure out of a global mudflow to re-start civilization.
The Royal Observatory at Greenwich became the world’s Prime Meridian in 1851.
Prior to the time of moving it to Greenwich in England, the Great Pyramid of Egypt was the ancient prime meridian of the Earth.
Someone left me a comment that the Trivium was removed in 1850. I have been unable to find an internet source to confirm the date, but the Trivium was the lower division of the seven liberal arts of classical education comprising grammar, logic, and rhetoric – subjects leading to the development and refinement of critical thinking and speaking skills.
My research has led me to the conclusion that the Great Frost of Ireland, which took place between 1740 – 1741, was somehow connected to the mud flood cataclysm, and that these events was deliberately caused in order to take control of the planetary grid system and Humanity.
The free energy electrical system in place around the world prior to this event either was no longer used, or desired to be used in the form it was in previously.
This was the Exhibition Building and Market Square Clocktower in Geelong, Australia, with its incredible design features, and what look like lightning rods and flag poles perhaps originally in place for receiving and transmitting energy.
The Clock Tower was demolished in 1923, and the remaining buildings were demolished in the early 1980s to make room for a new shopping center.
The free energy system was ultimately replaced with other forms of energy that could be monetized and controlled.
Trams around the world, which had been powered by electricity, were pulled by mules until perhaps the time the electrical system was figured out, like what you see in the foreground of this photo from the Southern Exposition of Louisville that wenton from 1883 to 1887…
…and when powering once again by electricity was figured out, within a few decades largely replaced by cars and buses in most of the cities they were in, like Montgomery, Alabama.
Montgomery is one of three places that I know of said to have had the first city-wide system of electric streetcars in 1886, which was known as the “Lightning Route.”
The streetcars were retired in a big ceremony and replaced by buses in 1936.
So, they are going to put in all the time, energy, money, and effort to develop an efficient mass transportation system like this, and then only use it for 50-years?
I am going to start by looking at the Great Hamburg Fire of 1842.
It is noteworthy that the fire took place in the Hamburg Altstadt, and started on May 5th on the Deichstrasse, or Dyke Street, which is the oldest remaining street in the Old City of Hamburg.
It was said to burn for 3-days before being extinguished, destroying about 1/3rd of the buildings in the Altstadt, and killing 51 people.
Interesting to note that there was a heavy demand on insurance companies that led to the establishment of reinsurance, or insurance for insurance companies to insulate them from major claims events. I wonder how this factors into the fire…
The fire was said to have begun in Eduard Cohen’s cigar factory, and that it quickly spread through wooden, half-timbered houses of Hamburg.
The great fire was also said to have destroyed the city’s Town Hall, which was said to have been rebuilt, starting in 1886 and opening in 1897…
…and the Nikolaikirche, or Church of St. Nicholas, which was said to have been rebuilt by 1874.
Here’s another view of the Nikolaikirche in the Hamburg Altstadt, with a beautiful stone- and brick-masonry bridge, as well as other beautiful infrastructure combining stone and brick.
Other interesting architecture of Hamburg includes this location with buildings on what looks like an artificial island, situated in the middle of a canal, connected by bridges to the towering buildings on both sides of it…
…and this massive building in Hamburg perfectly framed by an archway…
…just like the ancient temple in Carthage perfectly framed by the archway shown in the last post.
On an interesting side note, the first railway line in Hamburg, between Hamburg and Bergedorf, was opened on May 5th, 1842, on the the exact same day the Great Fire started.
This was the Bergedorf Station in Hamburg, used only for 4-years, between 1842 and 1846.
In July of 1845, a great fire was said to break-out in New York City.
It was said to have started in a whale-oil and candle-manufacturing establishment, and quickly spread to other wooden structures in Lower Manhattan.
Firemen battling the blaze were said to have been aided by water flowing from the Croton Aqueduct, said to have been completed in 1842 (the same year as the Hamburg fire).
We are told the 1845 Great Fire of New York destroyed 345 buildings in the southern part of the Financial District. This fire was said to confirm the effectiveness of restricting the building of wood-frame structures as areas which were rebuilt after the 1835 Great Fire of New York were of stone, masonry, iron roofs and iron shutters.
The 1845 fire was said to have destroyed buildings from below Wall Street on Broad Street…
…to Stone Street…
…up Whitehall Street to Bowling Green…
…and up Broadway to Exchange Place.
Yet these places pictured in New York City have incredibly large buildings of heavy masonry or bricks. When were these built?
The Great Pittsburgh Fire was said to have happened in the same year, on April 11th of 1845.
The Great Pittsburgh Fire was said to have been started by a woman who worked for Colonel Diehl on Ferry Street, who had just stoked a fire to heat wash water. This is a detail from a Nathaniel Currier print.
This is a good place to insert that famous artists and authors were part of creating how the new historical narrative that was being imprinted in our consciousness, and taking our attention away from questioning what is actually in the environment around us.
Charles Dickens was said to have described Pittsburgh in 1842 that the city had a great quantity of smoke hanging over it.
In spite of having no formal education after having left school to work in a factory because his father was in Debtors’ Prison, he edited a weekly journal for 20-years; wrote 15 novels; 5 novellas; and hundreds of short stories and articles. He’s one of many famous and incredibly accomplished people I have come across in my research said to have little or no training in their respective fields, including art and architecture.
The Third Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh was said to have stopped the progress of the fire in its direction, only losing a wooden cornice…
The Monongahela House, said to be Pittsburgh’s first hotel, was said to have first been built in 1840; destroyed by the 1845 fire; and subsequently rebuilt by 1847.
Notice the electric streetcar side-by-side with the horse-drawn carriages.
The flames were said to move slowly, giving people time to remove themselves and their belongings, and going to places like the Hill District, said to be undeveloped except for the newly built Allegheny Courthouse…
…crossing the Monongahela River at the bridge there – which is now called the Smithfield Street Bridge.
When it ended the next day, it was said to have destroyed 1/3rd of the city, leaving scattered chimneys and walls in the ruins, and it was said, inexplicably, there were occasional buildings left untouched amidst the destruction.
The Great Fire of Bucharest in what is now Romania took place in March of 1847…and was said to be the largest conflagration ever in Bucharest, destroying 1,850 buildings, and 1/3rd of the city in its richest and most populated part. 1850 buildings. Hmmm…there is a weird number synchronicity embedded in this data point.
At the time, Bucharest was the capital of the principality of Wallachia, which in 1417 became a tributary state of the Ottomon Empire. Wallachia united with Moldavia in 1859, leading to the formation of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881.
So far, all of these fires except the 1845 Great Fire of New York City were said to have destroyed 1/3rd of their respective cities.
The fire was said to have destroyed the central commercial part of the city. We are told that much was constructed out of wood, which together with narrow crowded streets, made them prone to fire.
It was said to have started near the St. Demetrius Church, burning the mahala, or neighborhood, of St. Demetrius. The word mahala is said to be Arabic in origin…in Eastern Europe?
…and burned the commercial streets of what is now called the Strada Franceza…
…the Strada Smardan…
…where the CEC Palace, or Savings Bank Palace, is located, and sold to host a museum in 2006.
…and here is the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City compared with the CEC Palace…
…and the Baratia church, said to have burned down in the fire and reconstructed by 1848, and the big bell for it cast in 1855, paid for by Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria…
…among other places in the old Bucharest.
A reconstruction fund was said to have been started after the fire was put out, with contributions from the Prince of Wallachia; banks; churches; monasteries; the Treasury; clerks and soldiers; the City Halls’ Association; and outside contributors. A reconstruction commission was formed, and so on and so forth.
For an in-depth expose of the modus operandi surrounding great fires, very similar to what I just shared about the Bucharest fire and its aftermath, I highly recommend that you look into Baltimore Fats YouTube Channel, and view his stellar analysis of the chain of events surrounding the Great Fire of Baltimore of 1904, and its aftermath. He has been producing a series of videos about it, and more yet to come ~ great stuff!
The St. Louis Fire of 1849 was said to have destroyed a significant part of St. Louis, Missouri…
…and many of the steamboats using the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
These two rivers converge near St. Louis, pictured on the right, and I believe they are actually canals, in comparison with the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers in Iowa on the top left; and the Blue Nile and White Nile in Khartoum in Sudan on the bottom left.
The fire was said to have started on the paddle-wheeled steamboat White Cloud, which was at the foot of Cherry Street, on May 17th, 1849.
This same year also coincided with the beginning of the California Gold Rush, which started in 1849. St. Louis was said to be the last major city where travellers could get supplies before heading west for the California and Oregon trails.
At any rate, the burning White Cloud was said to have been set adrift by the fire, and ended up burning 22 other different types of ships along the way, which soon leapt to buildings on the shore, burning everything on the waterfront levee for 4-blocks to Main Street and Olive Street.
It was said that as a result of these fires, a new building required new structures to be built of stone or brick.
So here you have an engraving from 1858 of Main Street in St. Louis, with its nice masonry…and horse-drawn wagons and dirt-covered street…
…and here is another example of perfect framing of the famous St. Louis Arch between buildings from Laclede’s landing.
This is the St. Louis City Hall circa 1900, said to have been built in 1890…
…and here it is today, missing some things from the original.
The first Great Toronto Fire was said to have occurred in 1849.
Also known as the Cathedral Fire, it was the first major fire in the history of Toronto, with much of the business core of the city being wiped out, we are told, including the predecessor of the St. James Cathedral, home of the oldest congregation in the city.
The St. James Cathedral was said to have been rebuilt starting in 1850, and opening to the public in 1853, and I have serious doubts about the veracity of that information….
This is a depiction of the 1831 City Hall and Market building at King and Front Street (now Nelson Street), said to have been destroyed and torn down in the 1849 Toronto Fire…
…and was said to have been rebuilt in 1850, and called St. Lawrence Hall, a meeting hall in a north-south orientation, and the first to be known as the St. Lawrence Market.
The railways were said to arrive in Toronto in 1850, and street rail-lines were said to have been operating from the Yorkville Town Hall in 1861…
…to the St. Lawrence market.
The Krakow Fire of 1850 in Poland was said to have started in July of that year, and lasted several days, destroying about 10-percent of Krakow.
It was said that in 1850, Krakow was still reliant on wood as a construction material, and that most of the 1,700 buildings in the city were wooden, and that the masonry ones had wooden elements.
This is a photo of Krupnicza Street, on which the fire in Krakow was said to have started in the grain mill area…
…and I can show you the same street corner lay-out in Conakry, Guinea in Africa on the top left; in Juarez, Mexico on the top right; Kherson, Ukraine on the bottom left; and Summerside on Prince Edward Island in Canada on the bottom right.
The accident is attributed to a miller and a smith who were trying to fix some equipment, and ended up starting a fire which spiraled out of control. Subsequently the fire was said to have grown, affecting the city center.
Students from the University of Krakow, also known as the Jagiellonian University…
…were said to have prevented the fire from causing more than superficial damage to the University’s library.
Buildings said to be damaged or destroyed by this fire were the Krakow Bishop’s Palace…
…the Wielopolski Palace…
…the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Krakow….
…and the Basilica of Holy Trinity in Krakow.
The fire was said to have cause economic stagnation in Krakow, the final establishment of fire-fighting service in 1865; and final restoration of affected buildings finishing in 1912.
In my next post, I will be finishing this series by looking at historical fires that took place in the historical record between 1851 and 1871.