[URBAN NOTE] "When Haileybury burned, Toronto sent streetcars"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's Chris Bateman shows how Toronto's surplus streetcars helped save the survivors of a fire-wrecked northern Ontario town in the 1920s.

The town of Haileybury sits on the shore of Lake Timiskaming, a serpentine body of water on the northern reaches of the Ottawa River that marks the border between Ontario and Quebec. From the town’s little main street, it’s almost two hours drive south to North Bay, and another hour to Sudbury.

Today, Haileybury is a picturesque if unremarkable community that amalgamated with the nearby towns of New Liskeard and Dymond to make Temiskaming Shores in 2004. But in 1922, the entire town of several thousand people was reduced to rubble and ashes—burned to the ground by a ferocious wildfire that still ranks among Canada’s most severe natural disasters.

“It is the worst disaster that has yet overtaken Northern Ontario,” Globe reporter Frank Phillips told a stunned province on October 6, 1922.

“Outstanding is the destruction of Haileybury. Where the county town of Timiskaming stood looking over the blue shores of the lake—a community of fine homes and splendid public buildings—there is now nothing but a waste of charred ruins.”

Whipped by 96 km/h winds, the fire blasted through the town in the early afternoon. Around 3:30 p.m., a general alarm was raised when the flames leapt across the town’s rail tracks. Within minutes, the entire business section of the city and the cathedral were alight.