The so-called Saturday Night Fire of October 7-8, 1871, was an omen of the Great Chicago Fire, which would erupt about twenty-four hours later and ten blocks to the south. It ignited around 10 p.m. in the boiler room of Lull & Holmes Planing mill, located at what is now 209 South Canal Street. The neighborhood was popularly known to insurance brokers as the "Red Flash" because of the combustibility of the local buildings and their contents. It was well into Sunday afternoon before this fire was extinguished, by which time four square blocks and close to a million dollars in property had gone up in smoke. As terrible as these losses were, the greater importance of the Saturday Night Fire was that it left Chicago's already undermanned and underequipped firefighters critically shorthanded and overtired, and some of their equipment badly damaged.
