SAVOIR FAIRE
The Lumber Barons and the Great Hull Fire of 1900

Marie Josée Tolszczuk,
Reference and Information Services

Raymond Ouimet has a passion for local history. Thanks to his knowledge and great story-telling abilities, we were able to relive the Great Hull Fire of 1900. Last April 26, the SAVOIR FAIRE presentation took place on the 100th anniversary, to the day, of the tragic event. The presentation was held outside the walls of the National Library, at the Hull Island Theatre. The restored building formerly housed the Municipal Outaouais Water Pump facility, which was in the heart of the area where the disaster began.

Mr. Ouimet began by re-creating the atmosphere, using actors and reconstructing the scene as well as the political and social context of the period in which the events took place.

At the turn of the century, there were three major groups: lumber barons, workers and inhabitants of the town of Hull, and the political gentry from both the provincial and municipal governments.

The lumber barons, as they were called, were the owners of the large sawmills. In fact, they owned most of the Outaouais. They were omnipresent, directing politics and municipal development as they pleased.

The inhabitants of Hull were workers in the sawmills over the summer and workers on the construction sites in the winter. They made up a group that was homogeneous and poor. Subject to the market laws of the turn of the 19th century, their living conditions were wretched, and they had very few means of making their demands heard.

As for the noteworthy officials of the town, they had limited power in relation to the lumber barons. Despite their interest in developing the town, the large ambitions of the landowners thwarted their efforts. There were two instances in which they were forced to back down from the landowners who refused to support the officials’ efforts to purchase a fire pump for the town of Hull.

The actors were part of a logging community that employed thousands in its sawmills and on its construction sites. Hull was a town in the middle of an industrial boom. A multitude of small and average-sized sawmills (Eddy, Hull Lumber & Booth) and chemical product factories gravitated around the two main industries. From both the Ontario and Quebec shores of the Outaouais, there was the unforgettable sight of thousands of metres of dried wood waiting to be shipped off.

The audience listened compassionately as Mr. Ouimet told the story of the Great Fire of 1900, and of the reaction of the people faced with the disaster. He provided an eloquent description of the fire, which started in a poorly swept chimney, and of the sinister hours that ensued. Can you imagine the residents who sought refuge on the shores of the river and who looked on to see, much to their astonishment, flaming blocks of wood floating down the waterway? Can you believe that a man spent hours next to a tub of water with a white iron container on his head to protect himself from the embers? In the same halls where the SAVOIR FAIRE presentation was held, three employees who were in charge of the water pumps watched their homes burn to the ground before their eyes. These same employees, through their determined effort to maintain water pressure, managed to save at least half the town from destruction.

These stories lead us to wonder why, after such an ordeal, both the sawmill owners and (on occasion) the inhabitants of Hull had not taken fire prevention more seriously. At that particular time, almost all of the larger sawmills caught fire on a regular basis. Most construction was of wood, which was a cheap and abundant building material. Despite the long working hours, the wood workers’ living conditions in the Outaouais region did not improve: they were harsh and deplorable. In the 19th century, fires were a regular source of misery and drama.

The lumber barons had to assume a large part of the responsibility for the fires. They always put their own interests first, and as long as their losses were minimal, they cared very little about the residents of Hull. The land on which they had built workers’ houses belonged to the large companies. Therefore, it was advantageous to the lumber barons for the workers to live on site. Of course, the large companies helped the workers reconstruct their homes, but they did just enough to keep the workers, but not enough so that they could acquire their independence. Once again, the workers found themselves in a precarious situation – they were forced to build their homes out of wood.

Unfortunately, it took the arrival of the first decade of the 20th century and the near disappearance of the town before there were any real changes in attitude. At the turn of the century, a few prominent figures such as Ludger Genest, Urgel Archambault and Alfonse Tessier achieved success in giving the town of Hull the means of ensuring its safety.

To learn more about the fires that affected the history of the city of Hull, you can consult Mr. Ouimet’s book Une ville en flammes.* Chock full of fascinating stories based on information found in the archives and regional newspapers in the National Library of Canada’s collections, you can follow the development of a region…through its fires.

* Ouimet, Raymond – Une ville en flammes. – Hull : Éditions Vents d’Ouest inc., 1996, 257 p.

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