The Great Fire of Fenelon Falls, April 21, 1884

By 1880, Fenelon Falls was finally starting to come together as a village, having been founded by land speculators Robert Jameson and James Wallis nearly 50 years earlier. The main street was lined with neatly finished shops, and new houses that were the pride of families who had worked so hard to make a new home. Yet its citizens were all too aware of one shortcoming—built almost entirely of wood, nineteenth century buildings were terribly susceptible to fire. Cedar shingles caught very easily and carried fires far too rapidly. For centuries larger centres had regulated against building with wood, but it was the economical material that was at hand in the Kawarthas.

Villages relied on bucket brigades to fight the infernos. It was a testament to their tireless struggle that the village survived any urban fires. As a stream of hands conveyed water onto the flames, fearless men scrambled on the roofs checking the blazes started from sparks falling on the shingles. But it was almost inevitable that sooner or later, a fire would get out of control and sweep through a block, or even an entire village. Fenelon Falls’ bucket brigades fared pretty well on the whole, and managed to suppress most fires before they consumed whole blocks. Sometimes, the other buildings ignited by flying sparks were not adjacent to those that were already burning.

At 1 AM on April 21, 1884, the dreaded cry of ‘FIRE!’ rang through the village when something ignited the kitchen of George Crandell’s Hotel (now the site of Cornerstone Home Furnishings). At the time, Crandell was perhaps the region’s best-known steamship captain, a founder of Sturgeon Point, and the famed Sturgeon Point Hotel (which like so many landmarks burned). Village residents tried desperately to slow the spread of the flames, but there was little that could be done:

"During its progress great excitement of course prevailing, and, with few exceptions, all present did their best to save the contents of the stores and dwellings from the flames, which fanned by a strong wind from the north, leapt from building to building with such rapidity that in the first three or four, a great part of the contents, especially such as were up-stairs, had to be abandoned to destruction. No lives were lost, nor have we heard of anyone being in much danger; but two or three persons in Crandell’s had to run out with some of their clothes in their hands and finish dressing on the sidewalk. Though our village is pretty well off as regards water, all we have in the way of fire engines are two small affairs, which, though useful enough in checking an incipient fire or preventing imperilled buildings from igniting, are but wasting their energies when attempting to extinguish a fire which has got fairly underway. Therefore when, on Monday morning, they were doing good service by playing on the fronts of buildings facing the fire, Councillor Thomson almost created an insurrection by taking them away in the vain hope of doing more good with them elsewhere; but Mr. Keith managed to have them brought back, and if it had not been for his determination not to be burnt out if he could help it, there is very little doubt that his store and Mr. Deyman’s furniture rooms (across from Crandell’s Hotel/Cornerstone, now Highlands Propane) would both have been destroyed, to say nothing of the buildings in their vicinity. Indeed, for a time no part of the centre of the village was safe, the wind carrying huge flakes of fire and blazing shingles for long distances in all directions, and many stores and dwellings were only saved by constant watchfulness and water on the roofs."

The villagers’ frenzied actions managed the contain the fire to the west side of Colborne Street and north of Francis Street, but it turned the corner (around what is now the Bank of Montreal), "where a small low house built of strips and plastered on both sides burnt so slowly that by desperate exertions the fire was prevented from spreading any further." At the time it was an unspeakable tragedy—most property owners carried partial insurance if any at all. But it was also a moment of regeneration, as wooden buildings would be replaced with brick—beginning the creation of the modern façade of the village. Much of what we now think of as the ‘Victorian’ was built in the aftermath of the Great Fire of Fenelon Falls.