The Great Saint John Fire of June 20, 1877

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June 20 is the anniversary of the "Great Saint John Fire 0f 1877", so it seems appropriate to finally cover it here in the Lost Valley blog. I must confess that there were other Saint John conflagrations which attract my interest, especially those which broke out in Portland near the waterfront. There were many, many of those. The Valley did though, play a supportive role in the tragic fire of 1877. It was in the valley that many families, and uncounted wagon loads of household and commercial goods took shelter, while the "fire demon" was hungrily licking the wooden structures in Saint John. It was to the ICR train station that the Western Union Telegraph Office was relocated, even as the fires were spreading. The first news the outside world had that Saint John was burning, was transmitted from the valley, and it is recorded that hooligans cut the line in attempt to isolate the town, and the telegraph line was then put under guard. Relief supplies began to pour into the city and it was all coordinated by The St. John Relief and Aid Society, which established its warehouse and distribution center inside the Victoria skating rink, alongside the Inter Colonial Railway tracks in the Valley.

The Isaac Erb (not "Erl") stereo photo of the INTERNATIONAL HOTEL sold for $37.76 which is to be expected. Saint John fire stereos are rather common but this one is scarce. The owner of the hotel, an American, chose not to rebuild after the fire and he returned to New England. The name "International Hotel" was therefore up for grabs, and for a time it was used by a lodging house in the Valley, near the train station.

For we Saint John expatriates, Ebay is a convenient source of early stereo views of Portland and Saint John. Among the most commonly found are McClure, Climo and Simonson images of The Great Fire of June 20, 1877. It was a disaster which all local photographers scrambled to cover. Within a few days they were offering dozens of different images for stereo viewers which documented the smoking ruins as well as how some of the more prominent buildings appeared before they were consumed by flames. The greater number of these stereoviews were exported to New England, to relatives starving for news.

Today the U.S. is where most of these camera artifacts surface, and so far this month three lots of Saint John views have popped up on Ebay. I consult online markets regularly but I never bid on Saint John material. With stereo images like these, you don't need to make a purchase as the vendors usually offer a sharp scan, larger than the original image surface, in order to entice buyers. It is sufficient for me to copy the images to file, as I usually just need to reference the information the photographer recorded. Lost Valley stereos are far less common, but they do turn up. If I need to use an image to illustrate my writing, there is no copyright on any of these old images. The New Brunswick Museum in Saint John understands this fact, which explains their online gallery of Great Fire stereoviews. The images are so small that they are scarcely worth looking at. For historians or the collectors out there, the N.B.M. stereographic gallery serves only as a checklist.

James McClure left Saint John for Massachusetts circa 1881, possibly taking his cameras and much of his stock with him. I like the succinctness of his labels and the fact that he spelled the city name out in full.

"MARKET SQUARE, SAINT JOHN, N.B." by James McClure, sold for $12.53 plus postage last week on Ebay. The image has faded but we can see the problem McClure had with long exposure time. There are ten carts or carriages in the image and approximately thirty people, but because they are unaware of the photographer they do not stand still for him. It is one of the few "action shots" we have of the aftermath.

THE STORY OF THE GREAT FIRE IN ST. JOHN, N.B. by George Stewart, Jr. This is the cover of the paperback reprint produced in 1980 by NON-ENTITY PRESS, which used the McClure image of the rubble at Market Square. As you can see I paid the princely sum of $9.95 at the time, but it has been a handy reference all these years. Stewart selected from the dozens of stereo views of the fire available to him in 1877, and in a cost saving measure had a firm in Montreal prepare simple sketch facsimiles of the photos for his book. This removed all the blurred people and horse carts who had moved during the long exposures made by the photographers, or indeed inserted a few human figures for a sense of scale.
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