- [Narrator] They're melted, they're precious
and they reveal remarkable stories.
Here are 11 objects that survived the fire.
This object is hard to recognize
not only because it's melted,
but because it's something we don't use much anymore.
- This is actually a ball of watch chains.
So back in the day you had pocket watches
and these are all of the chains of those watches
that have been fused together in the fire.
- [Narrator] As the fire swept through the city,
someone buried this plate for safekeeping.
- What you see here with the gray
and pink discoloring is actually the result
of straw that was laid on top of the object
to protect it from the fire.
- [Narrator] This opened the door
to a building that's long gone.
- We had numerous buildings as you could imagine,
that were destroyed in the fire.
So now you had a large number of keys to buildings
that no longer existed.
- [Narrator] The History Museum has a few fragments
of the bell from Chicago's old Courthouse.
When the building was consumed by the fire,
the bell came thundering to the ground.
Entrepreneurs later came along and sold it off in pieces.
- Often those pieces were fashioned
into other sort of keepsake and mementos.
We have two of them here.
One is a miniature bell itself
and the second is a miniature fire helmet.
- [Narrator] There's another relic of the Courthouse nearby
in Lincoln Park.
This limestone finial stood on its roof.
- This is the most important building in the city.
It's a building that was considered to be fireproof.
- [Narrator] This relic of the fire is right outside
the History Museum, but it's not exactly on display.
The blob is hidden in the bushes.
It's believed to be a melted mess of tools and other objects
from a hardware store.
- It was originally intended to be a commemorative marker
for the fire.
So someone could see it and sort of be reminded of the fire,
but it is so heavy that it has sunken into the ground
over the course of time, to where it's now virtually hidden.
- [Narrator] This doll belong to young Elizabeth Richardson.
She and her family lived on the North side,
which was especially hard hit by the fire.
- As the fire was coming towards them,
they could see large rolling clouds of fire leaping
from building to building, headed in their direction.
When that's happening, you have to make very quick decisions
about what to take with you.
Many as times you can only feel what you can carry
in your hands.
I imagine that this doll was a prized possession
of Elizabeth if she was willing to take it
with her as her family fled from the fire.
- [Narrator] This relic was salvaged from a bakery.
- So here you have an example
of some homemade Chicago cookies
that literally became charcoal in the fire.
- [Narrator] And this was supposedly recovered
from Catherine O'Leary's barn, where the fires started.
- This bell is allegedly from Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
We don't have any way of definitively proving that,
but that is the legend.
- [Narrator] These fire alarm boxes were placed all
over the city before the fire.
It was a technologically advanced system
but it had one fatal flaw.
- Once that alarm was pulled,
you couldn't actually tell which alarm box it was.
So they sent the fire company to the wrong place.
- [Narrator] Right after the fire
this sign was displayed on the real estate office
of William Kerfoot.
- William Kerfoot who claimed
that his little wood shack was the first building
in the burned area,
ironically made out of wood
and with a hand painted sign
that said "all gone but wife, children and energy."
- [Narrator] The great fire looms large
over Chicago's imagination.
It's been the subject of books, movies, and works of art.
But these objects convey the story of the fire in a unique
and powerful way.
- I think it makes it real intangible
to have an object that you can look
at and sort of see, and touch and feel
and say this went through the fire.
This was a object that belonged to a person who went through
and survived and lived through the fire.
I think there's a power in that human connection
in that human story because these objects really sort
of represent the lives of people who they belong to.