About the Film
The October 8, 1871 Peshtigo Fire was the most devastating wildfire in American history.
On the same October day in 1871, the city of Chicago caught fire. When the flames were extinguished two days later, three square miles of the city was in ashes, 300 residents were dead, 17,000 structures were lost, and a third of the city’s 300,000 residents were homeless. Aid immediately began to flow into Chicago by train from Wisconsin and other neighboring states.
As Chicago’s fire flickered out on October 10, an urgent message sent by boat from a tiny lumber town arrived in Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild’s office. It read, “We are burning up. Send help.” All told, the Peshtigo fire burned 1.2 million acres and killed an estimated 1,500-2,500 people. The Peshtigo fire, not the Chicago fire, would prove to be the largest and most deadly fire in American history. Overshadowed by the more famous Chicago fire, the Peshtigo Fire story remains largely unknown.
Produced by award-winning filmmakers Kelly and Tammy Rundle of Fourth Wall Films, “PESHTIGO: American Firestorm” (working title) will combine vintage photos, artists renderings, limited re-enactments and archival materials with eye-witness accounts and perspectives from present-day historians and scholars, including Jerry Apps, PhD, the author of “When the White Pine was King”, and conservationists to tell the dramatic story of America’s deadliest firestorm. “Peshtigo” will be funded in part by the grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Rundles have received four previous Wisconsin Humanities Grant Awards in the last decade for “Country School: One Room – One Nation”, “Lost Nation: The Ioway 2 & 3”, “The Barn Raisers”, and “The Amish Incident: Wisconsin vs Yoder”.
