One-hundred-fifty years ago today, Portland suffered its third, and arguably worst, great fire. The Maine Sunday Telegram recently confirmed that the fire killed four people, but it left 10,000 citizens homeless and cut a swath across the center of the Portland peninsula, leaving behind little more than charred rubble. To commemorate the anniversary of the 1866 fire, we reached back five years into our archives, when Irwin Gratz visited the Portland Fire Museum, a collection of firefighting artifacts housed in an old fire station just steps from downtown Portland, and filed this report.
