16 Historical Records Lost to Fire and Rebuilt From Copies
Paper burns fast and completely, which is exactly why so much of the historical record exists only because someone, somewhere, happened to keep a duplicate. Archivists have a name for this kind of luck: redundancy, the unglamorous practice of making a second copy nobody expects to ever need.
Each entry below represents a moment when that redundancy paid off, sometimes by decades, sometimes by pure coincidence, after the original document went up in flames.
Library of Congress, Washington DC
British troops burned the Capitol building in 1814 during the War of 1812, destroying the small congressional library housed inside. Thomas Jefferson sold his own personal library of nearly 6,500 volumes to Congress the following year to rebuild the collection, a purchase that still forms the intellectual core of today’s Library of Congress.
Public Record Office of Ireland
An explosion and fire destroyed this Dublin archive in 1922 during the opening battle of the Irish Civil War, wiping out seven centuries of Irish census, church, and legal records in a single day. A modern project called Beyond 2022 has spent years locating duplicate copies of the lost documents scattered across archives in Britain and elsewhere and reassembling them into a searchable virtual reconstruction of the building’s contents.
National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis
A 1973 fire destroyed an estimated 16 to 18 million official US military personnel files, with no master duplicate ever having been kept in a separate location. Archivists have since spent decades reconstructing partial service records using alternate paperwork, including duplicate payroll and finance documents that had independently been filed at a separate Army facility.
Strasbourg’s Hortus Deliciarum
This twelfth-century illuminated manuscript, one of the most important encyclopedic texts of the medieval period, was destroyed when Prussian forces bombarded and burned the Strasbourg library in 1870. Its contents survive today largely because a scholar had painstakingly hand-copied and traced its illustrations decades earlier, before the fire, allowing the entire work to be reconstructed in print.
University of Leuven Library, Belgium
German forces burned this library in 1914 during World War I, destroying hundreds of thousands of volumes, and the rebuilt library was burned again by German bombardment in 1940 during World War II. Both times, international donations of duplicate editions from libraries and universities around the world were used to rebuild the collection from scratch.
Cotton Library Fire, London
A 1731 fire at Ashburnham House scorched the Cotton Library, badly damaging the only surviving manuscript of the Old English epic Beowulf. An Icelandic scholar transcribed the poem by hand decades later, and that transcript preserved readings from sections of the manuscript that have since continued to crumble away entirely.
Institut d’Égypte, Cairo
This scholarly institution, founded during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, burned during unrest in 2011, destroying tens of thousands of rare volumes including original copies of the Description de l’Égypte survey. Because the survey had been reprinted multiple times over the two centuries since its original publication, much of its content survived in editions held by libraries worldwide.
Cook County Property Records, Chicago
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed the courthouse and nearly all of the county’s property deeds and titles. The resulting chaos over who owned what land pushed Illinois toward adopting a more rigorous system of duplicate recording, and many property claims were ultimately settled using copies of deeds that had separately been filed with mortgage lenders.
Herzogin Anna Amalia Library, Weimar
A 2004 fire tore through this German library, destroying or damaging roughly 50,000 books, including rare volumes from the Baroque period. Conservators used digitized scans and duplicate editions held by other institutions to identify exactly which pages and illustrations needed to be reconstructed in the damaged originals.
Jaffna Public Library, Sri Lanka
A mob burned this library in 1981 during ethnic unrest, destroying nearly 100,000 volumes including rare Tamil manuscripts, some found nowhere else in the world. A portion of the lost material was later recovered because microfilm copies had previously been sent to research institutions outside the country.
National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo
Shelling during the siege of Sarajevo set this library ablaze in 1992, destroying the majority of the national collection documenting the region’s multicultural literary history. International conservationists later located and digitized microfilm copies that had been sent abroad decades earlier, allowing partial reconstruction of what had been lost.
Copenhagen Fire of 1728
This fire tore through much of Copenhagen, destroying part of the university library along with a portion of scholar Árni Magnússon’s collection of medieval Icelandic manuscripts. Because many of the same sagas existed in other copies still held in Iceland, scholars were able to reconstruct much of the lost material’s content, if not the original physical pages.
Moscow Fire of 1812
Napoleon’s invasion triggered a massive fire across Moscow that destroyed the only known manuscript of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, a foundational work of Old East Slavic literature. The text survived only because a printed copy had been made in 1800, twelve years before the fire, giving scholars their sole surviving record of the original wording.
US Patent Office Fire of 1836
A fire in Washington destroyed the original models and paper records for every patent the United States had issued up to that point. Congress required inventors to submit duplicate copies of their applications going forward, and officials spent years afterward tracking down inventors’ personal copies to rebuild what became known as the restored patent series.
Windsor Castle Fire
A 1992 fire severely damaged the state rooms of Windsor Castle, destroying furnishings and decorative elements built up over centuries. Restorers relied heavily on historic photographs, architectural drawings, and detailed prior inventories to recreate damaged rooms, including St George’s Hall, with close accuracy.
Biblioteca Nazionale, Turin
A fire in 1904 destroyed a significant portion of this Italian library’s manuscript collection, including rare medieval texts. Some of the lost material was later reconstructed using photographic reproductions that scholars had made of the manuscripts in the years before the fire, for research purposes unrelated to preservation.
What Redundancy Actually Protects
None of these institutions burned because anyone was careless in any obvious sense. Fire moves faster than judgment, and paper, parchment, and film are simply willing fuel, regardless of how carefully they were shelved the night before.
What saved each collection was not vigilance but duplication, often made for reasons that had nothing to do with disaster planning. A transcript made out of scholarly curiosity, a printed edition sold for profit, a photograph taken for an unrelated study: these are the accidents that history now depends on.
More from Go2Tutors!
- The Romanov Crown Jewels and Their Tragic Fate
- 13 Historical Mysteries That Science Still Can’t Solve
- Famous Hoaxes That Fooled the World for Years
- 15 Child Stars with Tragic Adult Lives
- 16 Famous Jewelry Pieces in History
Like Go2Tutors’s content? Follow us on MSN.
