Atlanta Fire of 1917
The burning of the city of Atlanta is a major plot feature of Gone With the Wind, recognition of the destruction wreaked on the city by Sherman’s army to prevent its recapture by the Confederates. The 1864 fire was devastating, but its damage is rivaled by that done the rebuilt city just over fifty years later when a mattress fire in a warehouse above Decatur Street proved too much.
Driven by the wind, the fire quickly spread north to largely residential Sweet Auburn. Wooden shanties and lean-tos in the vicinity of the Georgia Railroad tracks fed the flames, and it soon proved beyond the control of firemen. Many, if not most, of Atlanta’s homes and buildings, were of wood shingle construction, and these proved to easily ignite and tossed off embers while burning.
The hot embers easily found other shingles to ignite as the wind, magnified by the fire’s drawing in oxygen, blew them about. The fire burned and spread for nearly twelve hours. Desperate firefighters used dynamite to destroy homes in the fire’s path, dousing the ruins with water in an attempt to control its spread. The fire continued to burn for nearly twelve hours before it was stopped over one mile north of the warehouse where it began.
Three hundred acres encompassing over seventy city blocks were destroyed by the fire. Almost two thousand buildings were completely destroyed. Firefighters from as far away as Chattanooga and Augusta continued to battle small fires and smoldering ruins for several days.
Sherman had done more damage in 1864, but the city had been rapidly rebuilt. Damage from the 1917 fire was still visible in some areas for decades. Much of the destroyed area was rebuilt as public housing and parks; most of the spacious, post-Civil War homes destroyed by the fire were never rebuilt.