page_title: Peshtigo fire
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Peshtigo fire / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: The exterior for the en:Peshtigo Fire Museum in en:Peshtigo, Wisconsin, USA.
context_page_description: The Peshtigo fire was a very large forest fire that took place on October 8, 1871, in northeastern Wisconsin, United States, including much of the southern half of the Door Peninsula and adjacent parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The largest community in the affected area was Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The fire burned approximately 1,200,000 acres and is the deadliest wildfire in recorded history, with the number of deaths estimated between 1,500 and 2,500.
  Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten, even though it killed far more people. Several cities in Michigan, including Holland and Manistee and Port Huron, also had major fires on the same day, leading to various theories by contemporaries and later historians that they had a common cause.
context_section_description: The Peshtigo Fire Museum, just west of U.S. Highway 41, has a small collection of artifacts from the fire, first-person descriptions of the event, and a graveyard dedicated to victims of the tragedy. A memorial commemorating the fire was dedicated on October 8, 2012 at the bridge over the Peshtigo River.
  The chapel where Sister Adele Brise and others sheltered from the fire has become the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help. The site is a Marian shrine, where visitors can make religious pilgrimages.
  The combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that created the firestorm, primarily representing the conditions at the boundaries of human settlement and natural areas, is known as the "Peshtigo Paradigm". The condition was closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. The bombing of Dresden and the even more severe bombing of Tokyo by incendiary devices resulted in death tolls comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
caption: Peshtigo Fire Museum
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