HINCKLEY, Minn. — It should have been a routine Saturday afternoon train ride south from Duluth to St. Paul, about five hours in all.

Then came the smoke.

Passenger L.S. Meeker wasn't alone in noticing the hazy atmosphere after about an hour's traveling south on the St. Paul & Duluth Limited No. 4 train on Sept. 1, 1894. Then it got worse. Darker.

"By 3:30 the sky was dark as midnight," Meeker recounted later.

Nobody on the Limited knew it yet, but they were racing toward a wall of fire.

The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894 burned itself out in just four to five hours. In that time, it devastated about 500 square miles of northeast Minnesota, burned the town of Hinckley to the ground and killed more than 400 people — becoming one of Minnesota's worst natural disasters.

Amid the destruct

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