The Tornado of Fire Couldn’t Get Them

On October 8, 1871, fire destroyed the tiny Door County settlement of Williamsonville. Seven men sought refuge in a well. Only five would climb back out alive.

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The Hidden Story

Williamsonville had barely begun.

Brothers Thomas and Fred Williamson had settled here in the late 1860s, and a small community grew around a steam-powered shingle mill built along the Ahnapee River in 1870. Within a year, the clearing contained a general store, blacksmith shop, large barn, boarding house, eight houses and at least two wells.

Then came 1871.

The summer and early fall had been extraordinarily dry. Fire was nothing unusual in the forests and newly cleared farmland of northeastern Wisconsin, but the landscape had become dangerously combustible. Even normally wet areas had dried out, while smoke from scattered fires hung in the air.

On the night of October 8, those scattered fires became something altogether different.

Why It Matters

Williamsonville disappeared, but the story did not.

In 1927, Door County established Tornado Memorial County Park on part of the former village site. It became the first park in the Door County park system. Today the quiet three-acre park preserves something extraordinary: the well.

More than 150 years after the fire, visitors can still stand beside the physical feature associated with one of Williamsonville's most remarkable survival stories.

Questions That Remain

The old sketch map of Williamsonville shows two wells, numbered 5 and 7. Beside the account of the seven men, its author wrote that there was some doubt about which of the two wells they actually entered. Moran and Somerville reproduced that sketch in their 1990 study of the Williamsonville fire.

The surviving well at Tornado Memorial County Park is commemorated as the refuge and remains the physical focus of the story today. But the older uncertainty is worth preserving rather than erasing.

The Big Picture

It is a reminder of something easy to forget when looking backward across a century and a half: history rarely arrives with every detail neatly labeled.

What happened here on October 8, 1871, is nevertheless starkly clear.

A village stood here.

A firestorm came.

Seven men climbed into a well.

Keep Exploring

Five came back out.

Sources & Further Exploration

Tornadoes of Fire at Williamsonville, Wisconsin, October 8, 1871
Joseph M. Moran and E. Lee Somerville, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Vol. 78 (1990)

Tornado Memorial County Park
Door County, Wisconsin

The Peshtigo Fire in Williamsville
Wisconsin 101, University of Wisconsin

Peshtigo Fire: Historical Newspaper Resources
Forest History Association of Wisconsin

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