Milton J. Burr (1821-1893) is one of my favorite characters from Lucas County's past. An acute observer of all that was going on around him, he's the sort of guy you'd like to sit down and visit with --- had he not been dead for 125 years.
The Burrs --- Milton and his wife, Alcinda --- were Quakers who brought their small family west from Belmont County, Ohio, during the spring of 1861 and settled on open prairie in Warren Township three miles southwest of Chariton. Their nearest neighbors, the Thomas Curtis family, had arrived the preceding fall.
The Burrs and the Curtises were by no means the first families to settle in the neighborhood, however. By 1861, Waynick Cemetery --- established by Peter and Susannah Waynick during September of 1851 upon the death of their daughter Orela Ann --- already was home to scattered pioneer graves.
During early November, one of those great prairie fires the still scoured the landscape periodically struck western Lucas County and Clarke County to the west, coming dangerously near the farmsteads of the Burrs, the Curtises and their neighbors. It failed, however, to jump the Chariton River.
Before leaving Belmont County earlier that year, Milton had stopped at the offices of The Belmont Chronicle in Saint Clairsville and made sure his subscription was paid up so that the news from home would follow him west. Soon after the November fire, he put pen to paper and wrote a letter to The Chronicle describing the fire and it was duly published in Saint Clairsville on Nov. 21.
The references in the final paragraph are to unrest along the Iowa-Missouri boundary to the south, where secessionist sympathizers during this the first year of the Civil War had organized themselves into bands of "border ruffians" in order to harass their neighbors who were Union loyalists and frighten their neighbors to the north.
Here is Milton's report:
A PRAIRIE ON FIRE
The following extracts from a letter of Milton J. Burr, of Lucas county, Iowa, and who removed from this county recently will be read with interest:
Have you ever heard of the grandeur of a prairie on fire? I have often, but never witnessed it on an extensive scale until the evening and night of the 5th inst., and my prayer is from such grandeur, Oh God! deliver me in the future.
The smoke came in sight about 3 o'clock P.M., the wind blowing a heavy gale from North-west, and about dusk we saw the "lead" fire about 1-1/2 miles to the West outrunning the fleetest horse. Thos. Curtis and I started to assist our Western neighbors, and worked for them until we saw that our own premises were in imminent peril. We then pushed home, got one man to assist us, and by putting forth a superhuman effort until near 3 o'clock A.M., we checked its progress, and saved our property.
We were favored by a small creek (the Chariton River), and a body of timber to the West of us. The progress of fire in timbered land is comparatively slow. We watered up and down the creek for some half mile, plowed "firelands," &c., until near midnight, and after that. I am satisfied that Curtis and I whipped out a mile of fire in the timber, much of the distance through hazel brush so thick that it would bother a dog to get through.
Thousands and tens of thousands of rails were burned, laying exposed any number of cornfields, stacks, stables, &c., in proportion were consumed. I know one man, having some eighty acres fenced, that lost all his fence, stables, sheds, wheat, oats and some cattle; in short, almost everything but his house, and what is still worse, has no timber to repair with.
We have heard of the progress of the fire for one hundred miles and that some six or eight persons were burned to death in it. Tongue cannot tell, or imagination depict, the horrors of the scene. I hope the "hail mingled with fire" that swept over Egypt, and the "fire and brimstone" that consumed two ancient cities, were not more terrific.
In grass, the fire runs wild-goose fashion, with a "lead," (as our people call it) and side wings. It was the East wing we had to contend with. With the lead fire we could do nothing, for it ran full ten miles an hour, with a blaze from twenty to forty feet long. Imagine ten thousand acres of grass, from knee to waist high, thick as hemp, dry as powder, in such a state of conflagration and all your property in the midst of it, and you can form some faint idea of the horror of the scene; but to realize it, you must see it.
The weather is dry and fine. Pork commanding from $1.50 to $2.00 per cwit. Matters now quiet on our Southern border and many of the loyal Missourians are returning to their homes.
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