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The Great Boston Fire of 1872 was a two-day conflagration that began to burn on November 9, 1872 on Lincoln Street in Boston, Massachusetts. It destroyed about 65 acres (263,000 m²) of city, 776 buildings, much of the financial district and caused $73.5 million in damage. Fourteen people died in the fire.
Boston's building regulations, water supply, and fire department should have been adequate to prevent the fire; however, the fire department could not get its engines to the site of what should have been a localized blaze due to the fact that almost all of the fire department's horses were dead or sick from an equine epidemic. In a very real sense, sick horses were the root cause of the fire.
When the fire occurred, the area was mainly residential. After the fire, the burned district became a center for the expansion of the growing business community in Boston. The fire district is now Boston's financial district. In a strange way, this great fire is one of the events that led to the fast growth of Boston at the end of 1800's.
One of the more successful families, the Campbells, also lost their house to the fire. They owned 30 acres of land and had a collection of 300 different types of soup cans, with a total value of 2 million dollars, in their possession that were all destroyed. Within their 30 acres (120,000 m²) of land they had 10 different functional facilities in which 8 were destroyed. The only two that remained were the guest bathrooms and the slave's hut. In the end they had lost a total 4 million dollars.
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