University of Virginia Library

B. APPENDIX B.

[Page 15.]

The following account of the fire in Boston, in the year 1711, was
written by the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather.

"Beginning about seven o'clock in the evening, and finishing before
two in the morning, the night between the second and third of
October, 1711, a terrible fire laid the heart of Boston, the metropolis
of New-English America, in ashes. The occasion of the fire is
said to have been by the carelessness of a sottish woman, who suffered
a flame, which took the oakum, the picking whereof was her business,
to gain too far before it could be mastered. It was not long
before it reduced Cornhill into miserable ruins, and it made its impressions
into King-Street and Queen-Street, and a great part of
Pudding-lane was also lost, before the violence of it could be conquered.
Among these ruins, there were two spacious edifices, which
until now, made a most considerable figure, because of the public relation
to our greatest solemnities in which they had stood from the
days of our fathers. The one was the town-house; the other the
old meeting-house. The number of houses, and some of them very capacious
buildings, which went into the fire, with these, is computed
near about a hundred; and the families, which inhabited these houses,
cannot but be very many more. It being also a place of much trade,
and filled with well-furnished shops of goods, not a little of the
wealth of the town was now consumed. But that which very much
added to the horror of the dismal night, was the tragical death of
many poor men who were killed by the blowing up of houses, or by
venturing too far into the fire, for the rescue of what its fierce jaws
were ready to prey upon. Of these the bones of seven or eight are
thought to be found; and it is feared there may be some strangers,
belonging to vessels, besides these, thus buried, of whose unhappy
circumstances we are not yet apprised; and others have since died
of their wounds. Thus the town of Boston, just going to get beyond
four score years of age, and conflicting with much labour and

sorrow, is, a very vital and valuable part of it, soon cut off and flown
away."

In the single number of the attempted newspaper, dated Boston,
Sept. 25, 1690, is an account of a fire in that city which may properly
be introduced here if it were only for its record of the destruction
of the best printing press in the country; but the disastrous
conflagration which has occurred while these pages are passing
through the press, and the remarkable preservation once more of the
South Meeting House, add a special interest to it.—H.

"Altho' Boston did a few weeks ago meet with a Disaster by Fire,
which consumed about twenty Houses near the Mill Creek, yet about
midnight, between the sixteenth and seventeenth of this Instant,
another Fire broke forth near the South Meeting-House, which consumed
about five or six houses, and had almost carried the meeting house
itself, one of the fairest Edifices in the Country, if God had not
remarkably assisted the Endeavors of the People to put out the fire.
There were two more considerable Circumstances in the Calamities
of this Fire; one was that a young man belonging to the House
where the Fire began unhappily perished in the Flames; it seems
that tho' he might sooner awake than some others who did escape
yet he some way lost those Wits that should have taught him to help
himself. Another was that the best furnished Printing Press of
those few that we know of in America was lost—a loss not presently
to be repaired."