evidence: The first alarm went up in the late afternoon of the 4th a fire had broken out at a building next to a boat yard, in the area that is now near Becky's Diner on Commercial Street. The official record from the Portland Fire Department's Fire Museum cites two boys playing with fire crackers, which caught on a pile of wood shavings, as the cause. It should have been a small fire, but Mother Nature was not working in the city's favor. "The wind coming in off the harbor was just enough to spread it to the next building and thus to the next -- and this wooden, ancient city down by the harbor began to catch, building, after building, after building, after building," recounts historian Herb Adams. [...] Author John Neal described the terrible day in his work The Great Conflagration in Portland: "The heavens gathered blackness and a hurricane of fire swept over the city." He went on to write, "Then came the crash of walls the screams of women and children. The blasts of trumpets. The blowing up of buildings. Heavy explosions." [...] In all, more than 10,000 homes and 1,500 buildings were destroyed. Every single newspaper office. Every lawyer's office. Nearly every bank and church. All of them gone. Author John Neal wrote: "Even now - there are tears in my eyes and tears in my heart As I attempt to tell you of the appalling calamity that has fallen upon us here in Portland."