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French-Canadian history

How Samuel de Champlain Started a War

Among his many accomplishments, which include founding Quebec City and mapping New France, Samuel de Champlain started a war.

Born into a family of mariners in 1567, Champlain began exploring North America in 1603 with his uncle, Francois Grave DuPont. Five years later, Champlain received the assignment to establish a colony in Canada.

Inauthentic depiction of Champlain, by Théophile Hamel

In the process, Champlain started a war with the Mohawks, part of the Iroquois Five Nations. By doing so he unintentionally drew the French into armed conflict with the Iroquois Five Nations. And he undermined French efforts to colonize New France.

New France

At the beginning of the 17th century, the French kingdom wanted to become an empire. After seeing the success of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, the French monarchy sought to plant roots in the Americas.

French navigators had begun exploring eastern Canada in the previous century. But those expeditions comprised small groups of men seeking to establish trading relationships with the Native Nations.

To make the most of the nascent fur trade, the French monarchy decided to begin building permanent settlements in Canada. They called the territory New France. To try and save the Crown money, they granted a prominent trader named Pierre Dugua de Mons a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade. In 1608, de Mons assigned Samuel de Champlain the task of establishing a colony and extending France’s trading network.

Champlain Arrives

Arriving in Canada in 1609, Champlain found a land in the midst of increasing turmoil. Over the past century, European diseases had preceded the French colonizers.

Suffering staggering population losses of 50 percent or more, Indigenous societies were gripped by despair and population crisis.

“The advent of Europeans in the Northeast in the early sixteenth century quickly upset the existing equilibrium and transformed it into a world of disease, division, violence, and death,” wrote historian Georges E. Sioui.

Map of New France by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.

The Mourning Wars

The Iroquoian peoples of the Northeast sought to rebuild their populations by adopting outsiders into their society. They often brought newcomers in as captives from battle — a phenomenon known as a Mourning War.

Forcing captured adoptees to abandon their old identities and take up new ones to fill a void in their new society could be rather violent. But the Mourning Wars served their purpose of stabilizing Indigenous societies.

After Europeans and their pathogens arrived, however, the Mourning Wars grew in frequency, scale and violence.

Iroquoian raiders attacked other nations in the Great Lakes, Canada, New York and New England. They made it as far east as the Abenaki, whose homelands stretched across Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

Champlain hinted at the increased warfare the country had seen. On a journey from Quebec to Mohawk territory, Champlain “saw four beautiful islands… which, like the Iroquois river, were formerly inhabited by Indians: but have been abandoned, since they have been at war with one another.”

The March to Lake Champlain

In the early stages of their Canadian colonization, the French aligned themselves with the Wendat, an Iroqouian people living in what is now southern Ontario. They also allied with several Algonquian peoples, such as the Montaignais.

Champlain hoped to use these alliances to expand France’s fur trading networks. Reflecting back on these alliances in 1619, Champlain wrote: “I came to the conclusion that it was very necessary to assist them, both to engage them the more to love us, and also to provide the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations [fur trading] which apparently could only be carried out with their help.”

To strengthen New France’s bond with these nations, Champlain agreed to accompany them on a raid on the Mohawk Nation. So he and nine other French soldiers joined a group of Wendat, Montagnais and other Algonqian warriors into Mohawk lands, which stretched from eastern New York into western Vermont.

The company tried their best to conceal their movements by traveling from Quebec to the Mohawk lands at night. Despite their attempts at stealth, Mohawk scouts kept track of their movements. A Jesuit chronicler of Champlain’s exploits later noted the Iroquois always had “sentinels upon the routes of their enemies.”

Finally, 200 Mohawk soldiers confronted the group on the shores of Lake Champlain.

The Shot Heard ‘Round New France

The two war bands now stood within earshot of one another. They exchanged insults and built fortifications. Seeing how their enemies had “barricaded themselves well” farther down Lake Champlain’s shore, the French and their Native allies agreed to postpone the fight until the next day.

The next day, the two forces came out to meet each other. According to Champlain, he led the charge, marching toward the Iroquois line until he was within some 30 yards of the enemy.

Champlain then claimed he drew his firearm and took aim at the Iroquoian leaders. “With this shot,” Champlain wrote, “two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded who died thereof a little later.”

While Champlain’s recounting of the event tells some truths, he was most likely exaggerating his role as a leader. The Jesuit Relations, a collection of letters written by French missionaries, temper Champlain’s telling of the battle.

According to the Jesuit Relations, Champlain had wanted to advance” toward the men perceived as the leaders of the Mohawk contingent. His Native allies, or “Kebec savages” as the Jesuits put it, prevented him. They told him to “withdraw behind our first rank, and when we are ready, thou shalt advance.”

No matter where Champlain stood when he fired his arquebus, however, he does seem to have killed several Mohawk warriors.

The Implications

Whether or not the Mohawk men Champlain killed occupied an important political role in their villages, by taking their lives Champlain started a war.

The hostile Iroquoian relations with New France also indirectly fanned the flames of the Mourning Wars. The Iroquois continued to lose population as they increasingly engaged in armed conflict with Europeans.

As a result, the Iroquois carried out more raids against their Native foes, hoping to capture enemies to balance out the loss of life. By the 1660s, contemporary European sources claimed that some two-thirds of the Iroquois population were foreigners adopted into Five Nations society.

Due to these raids, by the late 17th-century, Iroquois holdings ranged from New England’s western frontier to the Ohio River Valley.

Ultimately, the increased range and violence of the Mourning Wars destroyed the sovereignty of several Native Nations. The Wendat and Abenaki diaspora spread in several directions.

The Iroquois Five Nations survived the Mourning Wars and became the strongest Native Nation of the Northeast. But the demographic upheaval of the 17th-century left them unable to defend their sovereignty in the 18th.

In 1609, the French-Canadian population spread from northern Maine to the interior of Ontario and Quebec. However, it was sparse at best. Since Champlain started a war that continued into the 18^th century, it made it harder to convince French subjects to settle in New France.

Additionally, it led the Iroquois Five Nations to make alliances with the Dutch in New York and the British in New England.

Iroquois trading with Europeans, 1722

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.

This story updated in 2023.

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Maine Smuggling and the Raid on Calais

The northern tip of the Maine coast was a smugglers’ paradise for generations. In fact, Maine smuggling was an essential part of the economy there.

The famous turncoat Benedict Arnold chose to set himself up on Campobello Island to engage in illegal trade with America shortly after the American Revolution. Arnold recruited men from both the Canadian and U.S. sides of the border to load and unload merchandise.

Postcard view of the International Bridge dividing Saint Stephen and Calais

Then in the War of 1812, Maine’s northern coast served as a prime thoroughfare for smuggled goods.

And the booze smugglers were an industry unto themselves as Maine adopted prohibition in the late 1800s. They slipped in and out of the lightly patrolled coves and rivers. They also brought imbibers across to Canadian bars for a legal taste.

Maine Smuggling

It was no picnic for the customs agents, or ‘preventers,’ on either side of the border. A Canadian preventer’s son was kidnapped in one attempt to stop the illegal plaster trade. Pushing and shoving occasionally turned to gun play and threats as the customs agents were held at bay. Nationally, Maine got a reputation as a wild center for smuggling. But a raid on Calais in 1837, recorded in the Annals of Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick probably tops all the stories for sheer ingenuity and moxie.

Lumber was the matter at hand at the time. Lumber came down the Saint Croix River from both Canada and the United States. The river snakes its way through Calais, separating the two countries as it carves an exotic series of “S” curves on its way to the ocean. Crossing between Canada and the United States was as simple as walking across a bridge, or in winter as simple as walking across the ice when the river froze.

Map of Calais, Me. and Saint Stephen, N.B.

When the lumber reach the mouth of the river, it was taxed. Crafty lumbermen would declare the lumber’s country of origin based upon which country would cost them less. Customs officials were hard pressed to differentiate between a Canadian log and one from the U.S.

In 1837, however, the Customs House seemed to be getting smarter. One, two, three loads they declared illegal because they had the wrong country of origin. There was only one explanation: Someone who knew where the lumber was coming from upstream was providing that information to the Customs Office.

Odious Villain

The town was outraged. The Calais Advertiser labeled the informant an “odious villain.” One man accused of informing placed an advertisement in the paper. He declared he didn’t inform, and customs officers attested that he told the truth.

Finally, a group from town decided to put an end to the information flow. U.S. Customs had seized a cache of U.S. contraband across the border in Saint Stephen. On the bridge to America, the customs officer was greeted with an odd sight – a band of men dressed as Indians.

The men seized the officer, placed him in a wagon and drove him to into the woods on the Canadian side. Along the way, one of the disguised men dragged a sword along the rolling wagon wheel, sharpening it in a menacing manner.

The customs officer did not hold out long. While he may not have named the informant, he gave the crowd enough information to identify him. Faced with the charge, the informant fled town and the smuggling activity returned to normal.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Ghost Locomotives of the Great Maine Wilderness

Deep in the heart of Maine’s Allagash region sit two ghost locomotives silently rusting in the wilderness. Only a few intrepid canoes, hikers and snowmobilers can see the hulking machines, miles from any road or railhead.

The last of the great independent loggers, a Quebecois called King Ed Lacroix, put the ghost locomotives there.

Lacroix built a 13-mile railroad in the middle of the Allagash — some would call it nowhere — to haul pulpwood to Maine paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket.

One of the ghost locomotives

When the locomotives cooled down for the last time in 1933, they were simply left in the woods. “Allagash canoodlers stop and stare in disbelief at the ninety-ton locomotive, still standing there, way to hell and gone off in the woods, and wonder what kind of men brought it there, and why,” wrote Robert Pike in Tall Trees, Tough Men.

King Ed Lacroix

Edouard Lacroix would go wherever he thought he could make a buck cutting down trees.

At one time he employed more than 3,000 workers — clerks, scalers and lumbermen — mostly French-Canadian. And unlike some other logging barons he had a reputation for honesty, fairness and hard work. He paid his men decent wages and gave them modern equipment, comfortable living quarters and hearty meals.

King Ed often worked for the Great Northern Paper Co., which owned the world’s largest paper mill in East Millinocket, Maine. The mill produced a stupendous amount of newsprint, 300 tons a day, enough for nearly every newspaper in the United States. (It’s now shut down.)

In 1925, Lacroix made a deal with the Great Northern Paper Co. to deliver 125,000 cords of pulp per year from the Allagash to feed the giant Millinocket mills. Lacroix didn’t quail at the prospect of moving mountains of pulpwood from a wilderness miles from civilization.

The Allagash posed a further complication: It was in the watershed of the Saint John River in New Brunswick. The mills sat on the banks of the Penobscot.

Tramway History

The East Millinocket mill

To solve the problem, the logging industry dammed the Eagle and Chamberlain lakes so they drained into the Penobscot and not the Saint John. But the dam between the two lakes blocked logs floating to the Penobscot.

For a while, oxen hauled lumber from Eagle Lake to Chamberlain Lake. Then in 1902 the logging companies built a tramway to carry logs. The lumbermen supposedly kept their boardinghouses heated all winter by burning the ox yokes.

Remnants of the tramway still survive in Maine’s Tramway Historic District, part of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

The Tramway consisted of an elevated track along which log-filled cars moved. A steam-driven cable took them from Eagle Lake to Chamberlain Lake 3000 feet on the upper track. Then it returned the cars on the lower track. Click here and scroll down for a diagram of how it worked.

The tramway functioned well from 1902 to 1907, when the Lombard Steam Log Hauler made it obsolete.

Ghost Locomotives

Tramway remnants near the ghost locomotives

When King Ed LaCroix got the contract from the Great Northern in 1926, he decided to build a 13-mile long logging railroad from the eastern end of the old Tramway to Umbazooksus Lake, which connects to the Penobscot River.

He assembled his men and supplies in Lac-Frontiere, Quebec, and in Greenville Maine. On giant sleds he moved 60 railcars, a 1500-foot steel trestle and a 72-ton and a 90-ton steam locomotive. They traveled over icy logging roads and frozen lakes to Eagle Lake. He built three 225-foot-long conveyors that picked the pulpwood out of the lake and onto the cars. Each conveyor could move a cord of wood from the water to the railcar in 90 seconds. A 32-foot-long railcar could be filled with pulpwood in 18 minutes.

To power the locomotives, barrels of oil were floated by scow across Umbazooksus Lake.

King Lacroix never got to run the Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad. The Great Northern Co. bought him out in 1927. The railroad worked well, hauling 6,500 cords of pulpwood a week. (To see a video of a ride on the Eagle Lake & West Branch RR in 1966, click here.)

By 1933 the Great Depression had depressed demand for newsprint, so the Great Northern abandoned the Allagash, the railroad, the rolling stock and the ghost locomotives.

By the time demand for paper picked up, it was more efficient to use trucks to haul logs.

Aftermath

The ghost locomotives sat in a train shed for years. Then the Maine Forest Service mistakenly burned it down. The state, along with volunteers, shored up the ground underneath the ghost locomotives and painted them to prevent further rusting.

Today, the Allagash wilderness is remote and scenic with a 92-mile waterway protected by the State of Maine. National Geographic calls canoeing down the Allagash one of the 50 best adventure trips in the United States.

King Ed Lacroix was elected to Canada’s legislative assembly, leaving politics in 1945. His grandsons, Robert and Marcel Dutil, are successful Canadian businessmen.

During his heyday as a logging baron, one of King Ed’s employees – a log scaler — wrote a poem about him.

The Man of the Hour

These lines are composed by a scaler, it seems,
Who is scaling the pulp wood at Thoroughfare Stream,
Where the young and the old and the low and the high
Are singing the praises of Edouard Lacroix.

He sure is some hustler to corral all these means
In order to purchase such costly machines;
His mountains of pulp are a wonderful sight,
And tractors are humming by day and by night.

Photo of the ghost locomotives: By Will leavitt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42271454. This story about the ghost locomotives of Maine was updated in 2023.

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The Little Canadas of New England

Dozens of Little Canadas have contributed a significant but often ignored part of the character and history of New England since the 19^th century.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

They’ve given us magnificent churches, Catholic hospitals and sports heroes like Springfield’s Leo Durocher and Woonsocket’s Nap LaJoie. They’ve produced writers like Annie Proulx, who comes from Norwich, Conn., and chefs like Emeril LaGasse, a native of Fall River.

People from the Little Canadas have toiled in textile and paper mills, defense factories and logging camps. They’ve sent politicians like Norm D’Amours from New Hampshire and Fernand St. Germain from Rhode Island to Congress.

Even today, New England’s Little Canadas celebrate midnight Mass at Christmas with pancakes afterward and serve poutine – French fries, gravy and cheese curds – in restaurants and social clubs.

Leo Durocher

Creating Little Canadas

By 1990, Massachusetts had the highest number of Franco-Americans in the United States, with 310,636 – and nearly half of all Franco-Americans in New England. New Hampshire ranked fifth, with 118,857, Connecticut sixth with 110,426 and Maine eighth with 110,209. French speakers comprise at least 14 percent of the residents of Coos County in New Hampshire and Androscoggin and Aroostook counties in Maine.

They didn’t all come at once. Some were expelled by the British in the Great Roundup of 1755. Some fled the fighting between the French and British in the Patriots Rebellion of 1837.

In the 19^th century, most French Canadians who left for New England’s Little Canadas were young adults fleeing poverty, unemployment and backbreaking toil on subsistence farms.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French-speaking Canadians left Québec to work in New England’s factories, mills, potato fields and logging camps. The mythical figure Paul Bunyan was a Franco-American ( ‘Bunyan’ is similar to the Québécois phrase “bon yenne!“).

By 1850, most Franco-Americans lived in Vermont, named from the French words vert mont, or green mountain. The state’s most famous Franco-American export was the wildly popular singer and actor, Rudy Vallee, born in Island Pond. Even today, 26 percent of the residents of Canaan, Vt., speak French.

Work

By 1860, another 18,000 Canadian immigrants moved to New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This time, the economic boom after the Civil War attracted waves of French Canadians. They came to the huge textile mills in Lewiston, Maine, in Woonsocket, R.I., in Berlin and Manchester, N.H., and in Lowell, Worcester, Holyoke, New Bedford and Fall River, Mass. They were the only major ethnic group to arrive in the United States by train.

Wife and children of a poor French-Canadian potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Wife and children of a poor Franco-American potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By 1875, Quebec started luring its young people back by offering them free land. As many as half returned. They were called Canucks and resented by the Irish, who had arrived earlier and viewed them as interlopers willing to work for lower wages and take their mill jobs, tedious though they might be.

By 1900 they were still clustered in crowded Little Canadas like Woonsocket and Biddeford, Maine, both 60 percent Franco-American. The densest Little Canadas, not surprisingly, are along the Maine-Canada border in the St. John Valley. There, 79 percent of Frenchville residents speak French.

20th-Century

In the first decade of the 20^th century, the population of Salem, Mass., was more than one-fifth Quebecois and their children. In South Salem’s Little Canada, children attended French schools like Sainte-Chrétienne. They built French churches like Église Sainte-Anne and they started French businesses like St. Pierre’s Garage, Ouellette Construction and Soucy Insurance.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket.

Franco-Americans were almost all Roman Catholic, and strict ones at that. They believed that abandoning the French language meant abandoning their religion, and they clung to their language and customs longer than many other immigrant communities. They called it la survivance. Battles often erupted between French parishes and the Irish-dominated parishes over their desire to hire French-speaking priests.

Life in Little Canadas

Life in the Little Canadas revolved around the neighborhood parish and the home, where families were often large. By the 1920s, Little Canadas supported thriving French-language newspapers, Catholic schools, social clubs and fraternal organizations. They established Rivier College in Nashua and Assumption College in Worcester. They built the first Catholic hospital in Maine, St. Mary’s in Lewiston, and started the first credit union in the United States, also named St. Mary’s, in Manchester, N.H.

St. Ann Roman Catholic Church was built with nickels and dimes from Franco-American millworkers and painted with such magnificent frescoes it earned the nickname ‘the Sistine Chapel of Woonsocket.’

Manchester, N.H., had perhaps the most well-known of the Little Canadas on its west side, where Peyton Place author Grace Metalious and Revlon founder Charles Revson grew up. West Sider Rene Gagnon participated in the most celebrated flag raising in history, on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Jack Kerouac

The most famous Franco-American author, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac or Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell’s Little Canada.

Tensions with the Irish continued into the 1920s, as well as with the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Catholicism fueled the resurgence of the Klan in New England, especially Maine, and Franco-Americans stayed in their houses when the Klan roamed through Little Canadas looking for trouble.

By then, New England’s mills were in decline, and Quebec’s economy was booming. Franco-Americans began to drift back to Canada, emptying out some of New England’s Little Canadas. Finally, World War II ended their cultural isolation.

This story about New England’s Little Canadas was updated in 2022.

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Peyton Place – A Town, Its Scandals and the Woman Who Told the World

The dirty novel Peyton Place landed like a bombshell in 1956, a surprise hit by an unknown author. The critics panned it, the public loved it, the town it pictured resented it – and for the next 13 years it was a staple of American entertainment.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place became shorthand for secret scandals, mostly involving sex. Its author, Grace Metalious, was a New Hampshire schoolteacher’s wife whose own scandals were anything but secret. She was a mother of three and, by all accounts, a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband.

She based some of Peyton Place on the town she lived in with her family, Gilmanton, N.H.

“To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture,” Metalious once said. “But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot — all kinds of strange things crawl out.”

The people of Gilmanton felt victimized by Peyton Place, but it was Grace Metalious who was the book’s real victim.

Grace Metalious

Metalious was born Grace de Repentigny on Sept. 8, 1924, to poor Franco-American parents in Manchester, N.H. Her father, a merchant seaman, left the family when she was 10.

She graduated from Central High School, married George Metalious at 19, and gave birth to three children. Since her childhood she dreamed of being a writer. She began writing Peyton Place at 30, while George taught school in Gilmanton.

Scene from Peyton Place, the film

The fictional town of Peyton Place has shady streets, white church steeples, traditional New England houses and brick mills along the Connecticut River. But beneath the bucolic surface lurk ugly secrets.

In the book, Rodney Harrington, a rich kid, dies in a car crash while ogling a topless women driving with him, and Constance MacKenzie lives in fear that the illegitimacy of her daughter will be discovered. Metalious based the character of Selena Cross on a woman from Alton, N.H., who killed her father after he raped her. The story was uncovered by crusading reporters including a young Ben Bradlee.

She insisted Peyton Place was based on several places in New Hampshire – including Durham, where her husband attended the University of New Hampshire; Gilmanton, where he taught school; and Laconia, where her favorite bar was located.

Peyton Place, The Book

The book Peyton Place, published in 1956, was a smash hit, selling 100,000 copies in the first month. The average first novel sold 3,000 copies — if the author was lucky enough to get it published.

Promo for the film Peyton Place.

Critics trashed the book. Manchester Union-Leader publisher William Loeb called it ‘filthy sewage.’ Grace Metalious responded, “Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass.”

Peyton Place was one of the most widely read novels in American history. One in 29 Americans read it (mostly in secret), according to one estimate.

“If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste,” Metalious said.

Fame

Peyton Place was followed in 1957 by a hit movie of the same name starring Lana Turner and set in Camden, Maine. As many as 500 locals appeared as extras.

Lana Turner and betty Field in Peyton Place.

At first Peyton Place didn’t attract many moviegoers, but then Lana Turner’s daughter stabbed Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, and the film took off. It received nine Academy Award nominations.

The book and the movie made Grace Metalious rich — and reckless. She carried on a stormy affair with a Laconia DJ, divorced her husband and burned through millions of dollars. She took a floor at the Plaza hotel, ordered champagne by the case and flew chartered flights to the Caribbean.

Downward Spiral

Grace Metalious wrote three more books, none of which sold as well as Peyton Place. For the last five years of her life, she drank a fifth of liquor every day.

Grace Metalious in 1957

She dumped her Laconia DJ, reunited with George Metalious and parted again. Then she had an affair with a married British journalist. On a trip to Boston, she collapsed and ended up in Beth Israel Hospital. Grace Metalious died days later on Feb. 25, 1964, of cirrhosis of the liver.

Hours before she died, she changed her will to leave her entire estate to her British lover, who promised to take care of her children. Her family successfully contested the will, but it turned out she had $41,174 in the bank and debts of more than $200,000. Years of high living, gifts to friends and an embezzling agent left her insolvent.

Promotional photo showing the cast of Peyton Place in 1968.

In 1964, seven months after Grace Metalious died, ABC aired a prime-time soap opera based on the novel. (The producer refused to call it a soap opera, instead calling it a ‘high-class anthology drama.’) It launched the careers of Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal, among others. Peyton Place ran until 1969.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed this story about Grace Metalious, you may also want to read about other Franco-American writers here. If you’re interested in towns with hidden scandals, you may want to read Bar Harbor Babylon by the authors of this post.

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The Great Salem Fire of 1914 Burns Half the City Out of Their Homes

The Great Salem Fire of 1914 was one of the last great urban fires of the era. It followed the Portland, Maine, fire of 1866, the Chicago Fire of 1871, the Boston Fire of 1872 and the Chelsea, Mass., fire of 1906.

After the fire. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

After the Salem fire. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The conflagration cut a swath a half-mile wide and a mile-and-a-half long through the city. Miraculously, the fire killed only three people, but injured 60. Even more people died from the strain of losing their homes.

The firestorm gobbled up 1,376 buildings, leaving homeless 18,000 people – nearly half of Salem’s population. The conflagration destroyed so many businesses that 10,000 people lost their jobs.

Early Warnings

Salem had long been susceptible to fire, but the city’s growth after the turn of the century made it more so. Since 1905, an influx of immigrants swelled the population by 28 percent to 48,000. More than 5,000 newcomers arrived in the four years since 1910. They were Irish, Italian, Polish and French-Canadian immigrants come to work in the mills, the wharves and the tanneries. They jammed into neighborhoods like the French La Pointe.

Four years before the fire broke out, Selectman Franklin Wentworth warned it would happen. He wrote in a March 29, 1910 Salem Evening News article that the city was in danger of burning down. The city had too many combustible roofs, he argued.

No one, it seemed, paid any attention. Later, Wentworth became secretary of the National Board of Fire Underwriters.

The Great Salem Fire

Watching Their Homes Burn at the Great Salem Fire, June 25, 1914.

Salem was in the midst of a drought on the hot, windy day of June 25, 1914. Early in the afternoon the fire started at the Korn Leather Co. in Blubber Hollow, the leather manufacturing district. Rays of sunlight through a window may have set a pile of celluloid on fire. It caught barrels of a highly inflammable material used to make patent leather — acetone, amalacitate and alcohol.

Contemporary newspaper reports quoted a state official describing what happened. He said the fire started in a shed filled with sheepskin and three barrels filled with highly flammable substances. He didn’t know how the flames originated, but once they did they spread to the barrels and the sheepskins, then up the open elevator well to the third floor. There the floor had been saturated with the flammable substance.

Salem fire at its height. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The first alarm went off at 1:37 p.m. The fire spread so quickly a general alarmsounded four minutes later, and terrified Korn workers had to run for their lives from the burning building.

The block to the east caught immediately. So did the factories to the west. The fire crossed the street and consumed a factory and half a block of brick buildings. It swept down Boston Street and quickly doomed the entire district. Fire alarm boxes were pulled right and left as the fire swept through Salem.

Destruction

Historic Lafayette Street, one of the most beautiful in the city, was ravaged. A change in wind direction spared Chestnut Street and the McIntire Historic District. Ninety percent of Salem’s historic structures escaped the inferno.

The city’s entire French neighborhood was destroyed, including the newly built St. Joseph’s Church. Salem’s Franco-American population dropped to 5,000 from 15,000 after the fire.

Fire apparatus used to put out the Salem fire.

Fire apparatus sent by rail from Boston used to put out the Salem fire. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Firefighters from 21 cities and towns came to help. The Boston Fire Department sent fire apparatus by rail car. Hingham firefighters soaked rugs and clothing in salt water, then laid them on roofs to prevent the fire from spreading. Ten homes were dynamited to stop the fire in its path.

Kittens and Ice

Many of the firefighters were overcome by the intense heat, and lay down in puddles for relief.

Some people panicked and ran into their burning homes, only to retrieve items of little value. One woman seized a small piece of ice, another a pillow and a gallon of oil. A washerwoman saved a new broom. A man saved a watermelon.

A woman gave her husband two hatboxes to take to a safe place. One had his two best suits, the other two kittens. He joined a throng at the docks and decided he could only carry one hatbox, so he threw the one with the kittens into the harbor. He later found he’d thrown out his suits and saved the kittens.

Families sought refuge in public spaces, bringing what household goods they could save to the Salem Common, the Salem Willows, Forest River Park, and the Broad Street Cemetery.

Finally the Salem fire was out, 13 hours after it began. It continued to smolder, though. Three weeks later, Pickering’s coal pile and Ropes’s hay were still burning. Gone were factories, churches, homes, barns, schools, bridges, wharves, coal piles and shops.

The ruined city became an instant tourist attraction. It is estimated 1 million people came to see the smoldering ruins the next day.

Recovery

Even before firefighters extinguished the Salem fire, National Guardsmen handed out cookies and milk.

Fearing civil unrest, Gov. David Walsh had called up 1,700 militiamen. They were ordered to shoot looters on sight, but the only disturbance involved a resident reentering a guarded area.

The National Guard set up emergency aid stations during the fire. The Salem Armory became relief headquarters and clearinghouse for fire victims.

Salem fire victims get fed

Tent cities sprang up at Bertram Field at the high school, Forest River Park and Camp Sherry near the Willows. Food and clothing was distributed. The first business to reopen was a tent barbershop on Boston Street. Guardsmen handed out food, issuing about 6,000 rations a day in breadlines by the tent cities.

Aftermath

Within a year of the Salem fire, the city issued 353 permits for buildings in the burned-over district. Most were one and two-family dwellings. Salem adopted a new building code requiring fireproof construction, widened streets and planted hundreds of shade trees.

Asbestos manufacturer Johns-Manville took full advantage of the Salem fire, running an ad under a photo of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Co. that proclaimed:

Unharmed in the Midst of the Great Salem Fire because Roofed with J-M Asbestos Roofing

“The Roll of Honor”

Flying sparks and burning embers were literally showered upon the roof of this raw cotton storehouse of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Co., located in the midst of the recently flame-swept area of Salem, Mass.

Buildings all around it were burned to the ground, as the photograph shows.

Yet this building was absolutely unharmed because protected by J-M Asbestos Roofing.

Salem never rebuilt its manufacturing base to its previous size. The city changed into a college and tourist town and a bedroom community swallowed up by metropolitan Boston.

According to legend, the ghost of Giles Corey, Salem witch trial victim, haunted the graveyard on the night before the fire.

To see 150 images of the fire at the Peabody-Essex Museum’s Phillips Library Digital Collections, click here.

With thanks to Streets of Salem and The Salem Fire by Arthur B. Jones. This story about the Salem fire was updated in 2022.

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