Sadly, scenes of destruction and human suffering are all too familiar today. The ubiquity of smartphones has turned everyone into ersatz journalists.
As such, the public’s access to scenes from the front, if you will, whether they be the horrors of war in Ukraine and the Middle East or the devastation wrought by wildfires and other natural cataclysms, are plastered in front of our eyes, dominating our newsfeeds.
This, in turn, has fostered a degree of desensitization on the one hand, and incredible empathy on the other. The barrage is so constant that it is hard to imagine a time when these images were scarce.
Yet, there was, and in the grand scheme of history, it was not all that long ago.
Interestingly enough, it was a photographer who honed his craft in Central New York that helped bring these stirring images to the masses, personalizing disaster in a way all too familiar to us.
– George Barnard, circa 1870. After stints in Charleston, Chicago, and Rochester, where he helped his friend George Eastman pioneer the dry-plate photographic method, Barnard retired to his daughter’s farm outside of Marcellus. He died there in 1902. Onondaga Historical AssociationOHA
Sometime in the evening of October 8, 1871, a fire broke out in a small barn on the southwest side of Chicago.
A little over 24 hours later, rain, seemingly sent from the heavens, finally put out the conflagration, but the deluge was much too late. The fire that began in or near Kate O’Leary’s barn had cut a swath of destruction four miles long and a mile wide, right through the heart of the city’s business district, killing nearly 300.
More than 17,000 buildings were totally destroyed. Nearly 100,000 people were left homeless and destitute with a cold and blustery Chicago winter fast approaching.
Like so many cities across the country still recovering from the trauma of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, the citizens of Syracuse rallied to the cause of their devastated countrymen.
For weeks…
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