South Porcupine Burns, 1911

When you grow up in South Porcupine, one of the early historic lessons learned is about the Great Fire of 1911. In addition to burning more than 200,000 hectares of Northeastern Ontario and killing 70, it also levelled the two young mining settlements in the area, Pottsville and South Porcupine.

I was recently rooting through some of Sir James Whitney’s correspondence at the Archives of Ontario and came across a few reports on the fire that were passed on to the Premier by Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Chair Jacob Englehart. Rather than replicate the text here, I’ll allow the documents to do it themselves.

1911 Fire r

Within days, relief moneys began to pour in from across Canada and points beyond.

If you subscribe to a service like newspapers.com as I do, you can see how the fire was reported across Canada and the United States.