Hinckley Fire Series: Three Trains

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My art is usually inspired by stories, and climate change as a human-caused global disaster connects directly to my installation “The New Climate.” This work draws on the story of Minnesota’s greatest human-caused environmental disaster, the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.

As a special education teacher in a St. Paul school, I work with sixth graders who can submit History Day projects and advance to a state competition. A few years ago, one of my more inquisitive students asked, “What is your History Day project?” The question caught me off guard, but I answered: “The Hinckley Fire.” None of my students, and many of the adults in the classroom, had even heard of the fire.

The Hinckley Fire was part of my grandfather’s family stories when I was a child. In his words, “We had a relative in that fire who was in the history books.” I did not think about it much until I was invited to participate in a collaborative art exhibition at the Hinckley Fire Museum. While working with the museum, I also brought four artists from that collaboration into a self–co-curated exhibition titled “The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894: The New Climate.”

I added the byline “The New Climate” after recognizing the link between human-caused climate change today and Minnesota’s greatest human-caused ecological disaster to date.

Three Trains

The piece “Three Trains” is based on the three trains that encountered the fire that afternoon: on two of them most people survived, while on the third neither the passengers nor the train made it out. In researching the train routes, I found a recently published study using GIS to map the physical scar of the Hinckley Fire. Completed in 2015, this mapping served as the basis for a painting that illustrates the severity of the firestorm, which burned approximately 480 square miles in four and a half hours and destroyed 11 communities.

Nearly 500 people were killed, not including members of nearby Tribal communities whose losses were not fully counted. In exploring survivor stories, the book "Eld Cyclonen"—originally published in Swedish in 1894 and later translated into English—provided first-hand accounts of remarkable survival during the fire. To my surprise, I also discovered a photograph of my grandfather’s relative, John McGowan, who turned out to be the fireman on the train from Duluth. The following excerpts are drawn from Eld Cyclonen:

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Two trains from Duluth arrived on the Eastern Minnesota line and on the first train rescued about 500 persons who otherwise surely have perished. The second train arrived at 4:05 but because of a burnt out bridge could only proceed about a mile from town. Nevertheless, here gathered about 100 refugees who were taken aboard the train and after a hot race with death successfully reached the swamp, Skunk Lake, and were saved while, while the rescuing train , only a stones-cast away went up in smoke and ashes in a few minutes.

My intention for viewers is to feel the force and wonder of nature as it becomes out of balance. I choose to embed the outlines of the acrylic colored composition in charcoal which conveys a smoky quality to the overall canvas. Projecting the smoky atmosphere of a burning fire.