Musquash was a thriving town on the Bay of Fundy, boasting several factories, mills, a railway station, and a port.
All of that came to an abrupt end when the town was completely destroyed by a forest fire in only two hours one afternoon in 1903.
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The town of Musquash, in New Brunswick, Canada, was in 1903 nestled along the shores of the Musquash Estuary. Today the Musquash Estuary is an important nature preserve, known for its rich biodiversity, with marshes, mudflats, and tidal pools that serve as habitats for a variety of fish, shellfish, and migratory birds.
Back in 1903, though, Musquash was a thriving, tight-knit town. The townspeople shared a strong sense of community spirit and relied on one another for support and companionship.
Driven by fertile farmland and ample fishing, the community of Musquash had been steadily growing for some time. Then it had dramatically grown into a prosperous town because of the booming lumber trade.
The thick woods in the area led to a lucrative lumbering business, and several factories and mills in the area —the Knights Mill and the Clinch’s Mill being the two largest.
Saint John’s Daily Telegraph newspaper once wrote that “the hearts of the settlers in the parish beat with joy at the bright prospects of a very prosperous village.”
The fire that would destroy the thriving town had actually begun about two weeks earlier, relatively far away, in Springhill. The forest fire had likely been started by a lightning strike.
As soon as reports of the distant forest fire began to trickle in, local volunteer firefighters set off immediately to get it under control. Fire was always a concern, but at the time, this one did not seem to be either particularly large or particularly ominous. It was just one of many little forest fires that were burning that hot, dry summer in the Maritimes.
All that quickly changed when the remains of a tropical hurricane swept through on the night of June 2nd.
By the following morning, that small forest fire had become a raging inferno.
During the night, the acrid smell of black smoke began to waft into Musquash.
The flames were rapidly moving towards the town.
Despite the smoke that morning, the townspeople were still not aware of the speed the fire was moving that day. The Moncton Daily Transcript newspaper wrote that “Issac Linden left his house in the morning to put crops on a farm two or three miles away. At that time, the fire seemed a long way off.”
While some people were nonchalant, the mood was growing more anxious as more smoke began to pour into the town.
Even more men set off towards the fire with buckets and shovels. A newspaper report said that “every man in the place able to carry a bucket is out fighting the flames, which is moving down the river.”
By noon, it was all too obvious to the townspeople that something was seriously wrong in the forests around Musquash.
The black smoke darkening the sky had grown so thick that lamps had to be lit at noon in order to see.
With the men gone off to the forest to fight the fire, the women and children, fearing the worst, began to pack up their worldly goods onto wagons.
Only two hours later, it became clear that it was too late to fight the fire.
By that afternoon, according to the Daily Transcript, “during the afternoon the conflagration came in with a rush … a sheet of fire swept in from the woods.”
The fire was moving too quickly now; the townspeople had to abandon their homes and set off immediately to have any hope of saving their lives. A mood of chaos prevailed – the skies were too dark to see anything. The winds howled. Thick ashes and burning embers fell from the skies.
Despite it being all too clear at this point that they had to flee if they had any hope of saving their lives, instead of immediately trying to make it to safety, people checked on their neighbours, trying to help them to safety.
“Their efforts failed to save their homes,” the Moncton Daily Transcript wrote, “and they tried to assist their neighbours, but from house to house they were driven, and despite all their strength and engineering they finally fell back, defeated and ruined men.”
As the people of Musquash fled in the dark afternoon, unable to see, their destination was the marshes of nearby Gooseberry Cove. There, they hoped to reach the safety of the shallow, swampy, muddy waters of the Musquash Estuary, where the flames could not reach them.
The fire, however, was travelling too fast, and the smoke was too thick.
People got lost in the midday darkness.
Families got separated amid the heat, the wind, the swirling ashes. Confusion and chaos reigned.
“The women and children hurried … away from the homes which were quickly vanishing to the marshlands where there was no fear of the fire getting any hold,” wrote the Saint John Daily Telegraph. “There they remained through the night, many of them most scantily clad, without food, for everything was wiped out.”
They spent the night standing in the marshes of the Musquash Estuary while the flames roared around them, and ash and cinders fell from the skies.
While that newspaper rather understatedly remarked that “It was a hard experience,” for the townspeople, it must have felt like the end of the world. And indeed, it was the end of their world, of the lives that they had built in the town of Musquash, of their farms, their fields, their houses and their barns.
Not everyone made it out alive.
Several elderly people perished in their houses.
The farmer Issac Linden, who had left his house that morning to help another farmer plant his crops, later learned that his wife and her sister, Susan Teakles, had been at home when the fire swept in from the woods.
They had quickly fled their farmhouse on foot for the safety of the marshes at Gooseberry Cove. However, when they realised that their horse was still tied up in the barn, the flames were rapidly approaching, they went back to free the horse. Susan Teakles’ charred body was found with her hands still on the harness of the dead horse. Issac Linden would only learn what happened to them from reading the newspaper.
The next morning, after the fire abated, the dazed survivors emerged from the marshes to survey their town. They found that very little of it remained.
“Where there was once a thriving community, whose people were all employed, there is now nothing but smoking wilderness,” wrote the Moncton Daily Transcript. “Piles of brick, lime and debris mark the spot where once stood … the dwellings, churches, stores, barns, school house, factory, lumber camps, sportsmen’s cabins, mills, dry shed, barns, and railway station.”
Of the 110 structures in the town, only 6 remained.
The newspaper wrote that the residents were wandering around the ruins of their homes: “Strong, sober, industrious farmers, millmen or lumbermen, [were] seen standing about with haggard faces, hardly knowing what to do.”
Private homeowners’ insurance was not common until the 1950s. In the absence of a social safety net — there was no unemployment insurance for those whose jobs were now gone, and no old age security or Canada pension plan for the elderly — fires meant that survivors had lost everything.
Under the headline “Scene of Destitution,” The Daily Telegraph wrote the following of the people of Musquash’s prospects:
“The majority of those who have been left homeless are unable to help themselves and are at present at a loss to find a way out of their difficulties. The old men who have lost their homesteads and contents and even clothing are in sorry straits. Most of these, before the fire, were content in knowing that they at least owned their homes in which they could live quite peacefully. They were independent; now their homes are gone and their livelihood was taken away. What they will do in their remaining days is to some a perplexing question.”
A 6-year-old girl standing in the marsh that night watching the flames devour her hometown later recalled hearing someone say “My false teeth were in a glass of water by my bed and I will never be able to afford another set.”
The only hope was donations, and in that regard, Musquash was lucky that it was close to the wealthy big city of Saint John.
When news broke about the disaster that had befallen Musquash, a spontaneous flood of Saint Johners went to City Hall to make donations.
Even though the fire had not even remotely affected his city, the Mayor of Saint John declared a state of emergency and called up the militia, ordering them to Musquash to aid the survivors.
Charity fundraisers such as baseball games and church dinners were organised within days to raise money for Musquash, while Saint John’s newspapers encouraged donations by publishing the names of donors.
Sadly, what had happened to Musquash was not the least bit unique. Fires raging out of control, destroying forests, farms, and even entire towns was an all-too-common part of summer in the Maritimes. The terror that the people of Musquash had felt had been experienced by many other Atlantic Canadians, before and since.
Within that very same week of Musquash’s destruction, forest fires obliterated several other small New Brunswick farming communities and villages, including Hopewell Cape, Black River, and Balls Creek.
In many ways, the suffering was greater for survivors of those other forest fires, because they were further away from large cities, and didn’t encounter the generous help of Saint Johners that the people of Musquash did.
There was also nothing unique to New Brunswick about the forest fires that year, either. At the exact same time as the fires reached Musquash, another forest fire was ripping through Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Yarmouth would suffer catastrophic damage in that inferno.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, another, even larger forest fire was at the same time fast approaching the outskirts of Truro.
But finally, on June 6th, the Daily Telegraph triumphantly ran the headline: “Rain Last Night Gives Cause for Thankfulness and Hope … Fire Stays Its Destructive March.”
While that would mark the end of the forest fire season of 1903, the fact is that 1903 was, in the greater scheme of things, not even a particularly bad year for forest fires.
In the greater scheme of bad forest fire years, the 1903 destruction of Musquash would barely even register. Indeed, twenty years later, in 1923, a considerably larger inferno would again rip through the Musquash Estuary, dealing considerably more damage to the region.
But these big overall numbers about which year was worse for forest fires meant nothing to the people who had lost everything in the once-thriving little town of Musquash.
Everything they had built was gone, and they, like so many other Canadians over the centuries whose lives were touched by forest fires, now had to leave their beloved homes to try and start a new life from scratch elsewhere.
The Moncton Daily Transcript said simply that after a fire, “where there was once a thriving community, there is now nothing but smoking wilderness.”
