On the Limits of the Great Fire of Miramichi of 1825⁴

When Ganong began his forays into the headwaters of the Miramichi watershed, seventy-five years had passed since the Great Fire. Yet its consequences were still evident in the natural and human history of the area. The process of natural reforestation after a fire interested Ganong, but he found the existing information about the massive conflagration too unreliable to be useful. The written accounts he found all differed on the extent of the fire and the communities affected. Estimates of the area burned varied by thousands of acres, while some reports stated that entire settlements were destroyed and others that they were spared the wrath of the fire.

One undisputed fact was the date of the fire on October 7, 1825, during an unusually prolonged dry period. Whipped by hurricane-force winds, several small, unrelated forest fires joined to form a formidable blaze throughout the entire Miramichi River basin. “At Douglastown, scarcely any kind of property escaped the ravage of the fire. The Town of Newcastle with all the surrounding settlements became a total waste,” eyewitness Alexander Rankin reported in an account published a mere four days later. “Four miles through the interior,” he noted, “the greatest desolation took place.”

Ganong considered that the best-known account of the fire was written in 1832 by W.H. (Robert) Cooney in his Compendious History of the Northern Part of the Province of New Brunswick, and of the District of Gaspe in Lower Canada. Situating himself in Newcastle at the mouth of the Miramichi, Cooney set the scene by noting the unseasonable summer heat and a drought that had continued well into the autumn. Following is his dramatic description of the day of the fire:

About 12 o’clock, a pale sickly mist, lightly tinged with purple, emerged from the forest, and settled over it. This cloud soon retreated before a large dark one, which occupying its place, wrapt the firmament in a pall of vapour. This incumbrance, retaining its position, till about three o’clock, the heat became tormentingly sultry. There was not a single breath of air. The temperature was overloaded; — an irresistible lassitude seized the people; and a stupefying dullness seemed to pervade every place but the woods which now trembled, and rustled, and shook, with an incessant and thrilling noise of explosions rapidly following each other, and mingling their reports with a discordant variety of loud and boisterous sounds. At this time, the whole country appeared to be encircled by a Fiery Zone.

Ganong also unearthed accounts written years later, some of which included even the Tobique watershed in the limits of the fire. He decided to focus his own research on a series of interviews with old-time woodsmen. They had worked along the various tributaries of the Miramichi and knew the difference between trees that had grown since the fire and the older stands. One of the leading lumbermen of the region, Mr. E. Hutchison of Douglastown, was confident that many of the accounts were exaggerated. He based his opinion of the fire’s extent on the difference in the age of trees cut inside and outside the burned areas, pointing out to Ganong that “the basin of the Renous, Dungarvan and Bartholomew Rivers have all produced immense quantities of logs much older than could have grown since the great fire.”

The information Ganong gathered indicated that the fire had begun with a patchwork of localized forest fires scattered in a triangular region, extending from close to Fredericton and across the Miramichi watershed to the province’s eastern shore. In the days before October 7, strong, warm winds spread these unrelated fires, producing aggressive infernos that encompassed larger and larger areas. This, Ganong suggested, explained why some communities and not others were spared, and why the Cains River and Gaspereau River watersheds were extensively burned, while the Renous, Dungarvan, and Bartholomew River watersheds remained relatively untouched. Thanks to local first-hand knowledge, Ganong was able to make a satisfactory map of the extent of the Great Fire of Miramichi.

 

W.F. Ganong’s 1905 map illustrating the limits of the Great Fire of Miramichi of 1825 (PANB-MC1799)