Adventures in a Messy Life

Hands on learning for active learners

  • Home page
    • Start Here
    • About Us
    • Get all of the posts now!
    • Disclosure and other blogging information
  • Homeschooling
    • Homeschool Curriculum
    • Why I homeschool (comments from a former teacher)
    • Homeschooling and the Holidays
  • History and geography
    • Ancient History Lessons
    • Modern History lessons
    • American History Lessons
    • LEGO history
  • Science
  • Bible Curriculum
  • STORE

The Great Baltimore Fire, how one person or horse can change history

November 12, 2018 Ticia 12 Comments

Sometimes the most interesting bits of history, are not the ones we all know. As an example, I didn’t know a bit about the 1904 Great Baltimore Fire until we were researching Maryland for our United States geography lessons. Then I found out about the unsung heroes of the Great Baltimore Fire and Goliath the horse.

Future Ticia here, I’m updating this post about the Great Baltimore Fire because I was looking through our library and found the book we used on the shelves again, and wanted to look at this post again.

Great Baltimore Fire lesson in finding heroes

(This post contains affiliate links)

The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904

Apparently, a lot of the history I have for Maryland involves fire, because we also have the writing of the Star Spangled Banner and that involved painting the city on fire…

For a bit more background info I went to Wikipedia.

Great Baltimore fire craft

I couldn’t find what led to the fires starting, but as the fires raged on for days fire trucks from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. were brought in by train to help fight the fires. At that time, fire trucks were still drawn by horses (a fact important to the Great Baltimore fire book we’re about to use), and it was faster to truck them down.

Unfortunately, at that time fire hydrant sizes and fire hose sizes weren’t standardized, so many of the hoses didn’t fit onto the Baltimore fire hydrants.

find the heroes lesson

This got great press in the news about how backward Baltimore was, and all sorts of craziness, but in the end led to fire hydrants being standardized across the country.

While the Great Baltimore fire was a tragedy for the city of Baltimore, causing over 100 million in damages at the time (over 3 billion in today’s money) and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, it changed how fires were fought in this nation.

Goliath: Hero of the Great Baltimore Fire

When I was researching the state of Maryland, I knew nothing about this fire, the book Goliath: Hero of the Great Baltimore Fire came up in my search for Baltimore, and grabbed it up because Princess loves horses.

It was a good find.

Goliath is the lead horse to pull the massive Fire Engine No. 1, and his bravery as he stood fast in the face of fire inspired the firefighters he pulled in to fight the fire.

 

Our Great Baltimore Fire project

This is a case of keeping the project simple. I took a piece of copy paper and cut it into fourths.  Then each kid, folded their piece of paper in half, hamburger fold.

In the middle of the fold, they made two small cuts, about a half inch deep on either side and about a half inch or so apart from each other.

Baltimore fires history lesson

This tab is popped out so it can create a pop-up for the story. On what is going to be the top half of the story they drew buildings on fire. It was quite dramatic.

I had scanned and cut out pictures of Goliath pulling the fire engine. They then glued them onto their tab to make it stand up. You could also have them draw a picture of Goliath pulling the engine, but it was a new and different way to use the scanned picture (which is also why I’m not sharing it because that would be breaking copyright).

Goliath hero of Baltimore fires

My boys found the idea that soldiers and firemen from all over came down to stop the buildings absolutely fascinating, so they drew in the soldiers who came down to help.

All in all, I highly recommend the book.  As you can see from the scanned pictures the book has gorgeous illustrations, and the story is very touching.  And, of course, the horse survives.  An animal story is just no good if the animal dies.

More Unique lessons for primary grades

  • Easy to adapt math game for multiple skills
  • If You Give a Mouse a Cookie writing prompt
  • Combining art and science
  • Sun Unit

 

Originally published June 6, 2011

history, reading and writing book and activity, primary grades, US history

Comments

  1. Christy says

    June 23, 2011 at 12:22 pm

    1/3 of the families are in Latvia? That is so interesting! Do you have a large Latvian population where you are?

    Some states have a lot more books than others – Texas and New York have had the most that I have seen.

    Reply
  2. An Almost Unschooling Mom says

    June 23, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    I didn't even know there was a great Baltimore fire. I guess we'll have to check that out!

    Reply
  3. Ticia says

    June 23, 2011 at 6:58 pm

    Okay, all of the pictures seem to be missing from my post, so I need to explore what's happened to them, as well as part of my text.

    Reply
  4. MaryAnne says

    June 23, 2011 at 11:50 pm

    That horse story sounds great – and I love your boys' soldier drawing =)

    Any chance you or your friend would be interested in guest posting on Latvia on my blog? 😉

    Reply
  5. Sandra's Fiberworks says

    June 24, 2011 at 1:04 am

    interesting!

    Reply
  6. Raising a Happy Child says

    June 24, 2011 at 3:05 am

    Sounds like a good book and a pretty neat project to go with it!

    Reply
  7. Christy says

    June 24, 2011 at 11:31 am

    Now that I look at this post again, I guess I didn't see all of the pictures yesterday.

    Reply
  8. Phyllis at All Things Beautiful says

    November 12, 2018 at 1:03 pm

    Oh, yes as a Marylander, I knew about the fire and, yes, many other Maryland fires. It was a common occurrence apparently and also a technique in war times.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      November 16, 2018 at 9:07 am

      Interestingly, we don’t have a lot of stories of fires here in Texas. I wonder if that’s because there wasn’t a high population density here until the 20th century, and traditionally most of the buildings were adobe, so not super flammable.

  9. natalie planetsmartypants says

    November 16, 2018 at 5:53 pm

    So many years later, and we are still struggling with massive fires 🙁 Air quality is in the pits, but at least we did not lose our homes. I wonder how expensive the damage from Cal fires will end up being.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      November 17, 2018 at 3:03 pm

      I wonder that too. I know the fires we had here a few years ago were insane, and there were some places that never recovered.

  10. Joe DeFilippo says

    January 28, 2021 at 5:37 pm

    I thought I would bring to your attention a recording
    made in Baltimore called “Goliath” dealing with
    the heroic horse of the Great Baltimore Fire

    https://soundcloud.com/hillipsand/goliath

    We donated the song to the Fire Museum of Baltimore
    and hope that they will use the song in some capacity

    Look forward to hearing from you once you’ve had an
    opportunity to listen to the recording

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

Help!!!! I need to know:

Categories

 book and a movie combo

Copyright © 2023 ·