The Great Fire of Miramichi was one of the worst disasters in New Brunswick’s history. Its name is deceptive, though, because it wasn’t just a local forest fire in the Miramichi River region, but it actually burned nearly a third of the province.
It destroyed everything all the way from Tracide to Richibucto, and from Belledune all the way down to Fredericton.
I myself grew up hearing stories of the fire. My family is from the North Shore, and some of my ancestors had to hide from the flames in the river. One relative did not make it. She died on a raft floating on the Miramichi River as walls of flame surrounded her.
Today, we’re going to take you to as close to the Great Fire as possible by focusing on direct quotes from those who were there on that terrible day: October 7th, 1825.
This is part of a trilogy on the Great Fire of Miramichi:
Three days after he had departed Fredericton after its own fire, Governor Sir Howard Douglas arrived in the still-smoking ruins in what had recently been the bustling town of Newcastle. He climbed onto a pile of ruins to speak.
Slowly, the crowd of beleaguered survivors gathered around to hear the famously stylish Governor speak. Only once before had a Lieutenant-Governor ever visited the region — and that had been Douglas himself only a couple of months earlier. The people had been so impressed by him that they had renamed the town next to Newcastle Douglastown in his honour.
Douglastown had also been completely destroyed by the fire, too.
Sir Howard Douglas got there so fast that he arrived before any aid. The wider world was only beginning to learn what had happened. Douglas already knew, though. He appears to have made the journey in a birchbark canoe.
Atop the still-smoking ruins of Newcastle, Sir Howard Douglas began speaking to the survivors. According to the Royal Gazette, he struggled as he described what he had seen while canoeing there:
“…Charred, blackened forest, and charred bank, the vast funeral pile in which many of our fellow creatures have perished; dire, heartbreaking tales of woe … whole families and whole settlements annihilated … these overpower me … I cannot proceed …”
Then Lt.-Gov. Sir Howard Douglas, a combat veteran who had seen brutal fighting during the Napoleonic Wars, bowed his head … and cried.
It had all begun three days earlier, on October 7th, at exactly 7:30 in the evening. Suddenly, everything went silent, in the words of the Royal Gazette newspaper, “there was at that time a dead calm.”
Then all of a sudden, “a rumbling sound was heard to the north which increased with pitchy darkness.”
According to survivor Robert Cooney, the first sign that something was amiss appeared late in the afternoon of the 6th when “fitful flashes and blazes were seen to issue from different parts of the woods.”
The fire had moved with astonishing speed.
The fire was moving so fast that, according to an eyewitness named Alexander Rankin, it wouldn’t have mattered even if they had left right then, saying: “It travelled 85 miles in nine hours so that scarcely on a fleet horse could a man have escaped from it.”
The Royal Gazette newspaper wrote that “about half past seven, a rumbling noise was heard which increased rapidly with pitchy darkness.”
Cooney continued: “Suddenly a lengthened and sullen roar came booming through the forest, driving a thousand massive and devouring flames before it …”
“… Suddenly a whole dreadful hurricane of fire poured down,” the Gazette wrote, “bringing with it immense masses of flames, cinders, ashes and scourging the settlements with amazing rapidity.”
“An immense sheet of flame spread over nearly 6000 miles…” Cooney later wrote.
(Doubtful that a forest fire could consume 6000 miles, New Brunswick’s finest historian, William F. Ganong, examined “The Limits of The Great Fire,” in a 1905 study by that name. He ultimately concluded that it had actually consumed 8000 square miles!)
The Gazette wrote that Douglastown had been destroyed so quickly that people had to flee into the river: “The unfortunate inhabitants fled to the shore and by means of boats, canoes, rafts of timber, logs or any buoyant article … endeavoured to escape … to the town of Chatham — numbers of men, women, and children perishing in the attempt.”
Chatham, however, had been completely spared. Alexander Rankin recalled that “the flame advanced, twenty-five miles in breadth,” — but due to a sudden wind shift, the fire left a tiny green sliver of land, which happened to contain Chatham — completely untouched in an otherwise blackened wilderness.
Rankin had been a successful businessman but lost everything in the fire. He too recalled people seeking shelter in the river, “Some plunged into the river to escape destruction, others drifted on temporary rafts to meet death by drowning, hundreds sought refuge in a marsh near the town, which indeed proved the only place of safety.”
It wasn’t just humans hiding from the flames in the river, but animals too. In his autobiography ‘Redcoat Sailor,’ R. S. Lambert wrote that “cattle belonging to local farmers also resorted to the river, and stood there in herds, with only their heads and horns showing.”
“In one instance,” Lambert added, “a bear joined the cattle, staying there with them till all the danger was over, and then quietly walked off without doing any harm.”
Alexander Rankin also remembered the bear, remarking, “When the fire was over, the creature left without attempting mischief. [but] The very fish in the river suffered from the floating burning wood. Many were driven on the shore. Large numbers of salmon, bass, and trout were found on the river bank. The birds also suffered, especially the seagulls. Many were found dead. The snakes even crawled for the clearings.”
Alexander Rankin was remembering those events 40 years later in an interview with American travel writer James Johnston. Despite it being some four decades after the events when Johnston made his journey through the Miramichi region, he marvelled that he could still see the damage left by the Great Fire:
“Throughout the whole of this day's journey, the effects of the dreadful fire of 1825 were visible in the blackened stems of the tall upright dead trees, which still stood undecayed, as far as the eye could see, over the gloomy hills and flats. On newly burned land, the purple Epilohium waved its graceful leaves and purple flowers around the blackened trunks, and concealed in beauty the scorched underwood and fallen branches. But on these old burned lands, the desolation was more complete, and a more sullen gloom still rested over the doomed surface. The substance of the soil is gone, it is said, where the burning has been too severe. The vegetable matter, I suppose, is consumed; and this, where no living trees are shedding their annual leaves, it must take many years to restore … On our way, we saw fires burning in the woods in many places, which, in this dry season, only required a little wind to spread in one blaze over the whole forest.”
In the days after the fire, though, as Lt.-Gov. Douglas stood in the ruins of Newcastle. He dropped his prepared speech and began to speak off the cuff, saying: “You have experienced one of the most dreadful visitations that ever fell upon the earth! If the whole Globe had been in combustion not more terror could have been accumulated!”
Seemingly catching himself and becoming aware that his speech to the survivors was very dark, Douglas suddenly proclaimed: “I came to speak the language of hope.”
“The Government of your Province, the sympathies of your fellow men, your sister provinces … are ready to provide against want. They will pour in succours… to restore and revive what has been levelled and ruined. We cannot raise the dead, but we can comfort the living. We cannot reproduce the capital … but we can create wealth again. … The long winter approaches … but [help] is a certainty.”
Help was, in fact, not a certainty. Douglas doesn’t appear to have had any contact with the outside world when he said that. He seemed to simply be hoping his fellow Maritimers would send assistance.
He was right.
The news arrived in Nova Scotia first. There, the public and the government immediately filled two ships with food, clothing, money and medicine.
Newfoundland actually beat Nova Scotia in sending help, though. Imagine the joy of the stricken Miramichiers when the first sight of the Newfoundlanders' sails appeared on the horizon. Their aid was less versatile, though, consisting almost entirely of fish.
Saint John was busy sending two aid ships to Fredericton to cope with the fire there when news of the catastrophe in Miramichi arrived.
Saint Johners immediately began preparing two more aid ships containing supplies, medicine, money and men. With assistance from St. Stephen, St. Andrews and Woodstock, they also prepared a vast convoy of supplies which would make the difficult overland trek through the charred wilderness to the many stricken, smaller settlements.
Fredericton had just survived its own fire after the southernmost extent of the Great Fire of Miramichi burned one-third of the province's capital. Despite being preoccupied with hundreds of homeless Frederictonians living in tents in Officer’s Square, even Fredericton fundraised large sums of cash to send to Miramichi.
Dr. Norman MacLeod was one doctor who went to Miramichi with one of the aid ships. He described the scene that met his eyes as he disembarked:
“The forest extends, as it has done for ages, across plains, and vanishes over the undulating hills which bound the distant horizon. But while all the trees, with most of their branches, remain, spring extracts no bud from them, nor does summer clothe even a twig with foliage. All is a barren waste! The trees are not black now but white, and bleached by sun and rain, and far to the horizon, round and round, nothing is discerned but one vast, and apparently boundless forest of the white skeleton trunks of dead leafless trees. That immense tract is doomed to remain barren — perhaps forever — at least for many long years to come.”
“It seems incredible, but we believe there is no doubt as to the fact that the ashes of the fire fell thick on the streets of Halifax, St. John's, Newfoundland, and Quebec, and that some were carried as far as the Bermudas, while the smoke darkened the air hundreds of miles off.”
![House at Douglastown that withstood the famous Miramichi fire of October 1825, [ca.1925] (Provincial Archives of New Brunswick P380-86)](/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/003-the-great-fire-of-miramichi-61258fca.jpg)
